Modern Apple keyboards do not feature an AltGr key, but lets say that they do in spirit as they do on your ancient Apple keyboard. The point is that the AltGr key on the keyboard in the position of the Windows key on a PC keyboard. So by proxy the Windows key and not the AltGr key should produce additional characters on Haiku.
The position of the key on the keyboard is the entire point. But as I said before, people with an AltGr key on their keyboard expect that key to produce special characters no matter where it is positioned, and ultimately I’m not trying to change that even if I don’t think it’s correct. Then again I’m stupid and blind and don’t know what I’m talking about and I’m a jingoist chauvinist apparently so it doesn’t matter much what I think.
Adding something should be easier than changing a thing that already exists, no ? People who do not need the AltGr function will not need to enable it, but for those who have it on their keyboards , it will be there and function as expected.
I know, but I thing I lost your points because the glyphs you suggested looked too much like ancient runes …
What I am trying to imagine is that, at code/system level, the role for keys can be called whatever. If different from the key label, better yet. Then in the personalization of the OS, people can choose the layouts that fit their keyboards and preferences. Like,for example, here the Win key is typed with the left hand, also Alt. For those keyboards where not all symbols are in the “correct” places, AltGr ( right hand , right of spacebar ) supply them. Same as having Control and Shift both in the right and left hands. Most of times, I do not need to use AltGr. But some notebooks, or some exotic characters ( for me, in this country, that would include the Euro character, also the British Pound and that paragraph symbol ) .
Guys, why can’t we have a technical discussion, even a strongly opinionated one, without going into personal attack and name calling mode? If you state something wrong (happens to everybody at some point in time) and are corrected, simply admit it and be happy that you’ve learned something new. Happened to me several times in the years being on this forum.
You probably don’t care about how I feel, but being around this forum is not a lot of fun lately.
We’d have to add AltGr to the keymap definition for it to be used as a key role that is separate from Option, and that’s something we don’t want to do because it would break compatibility with the existing keymaps even though we have a ton of enhancements that are being held up by this for example Greekboy has added a bunch of new categories of diacritic marks used by the Greek language that we can’t include right now either because it too would break backwards compatibility.
This thread is really dragging on with people generally starting to repeat themselves, and way too much rudeness from multiple people. There is no way to completely satisfy everyone, and I can guarantee that some of the more odd suggestions will never be implemented. Before this gets locked by moderators (which is very close), I think there are a few possible developer “actionable” items which should probably get put into Trac tickets if they are not already:
Add AltGr as an official modifier? Are there really things that AltGr provides that Opt cannot for alternate characters?
Add some way to indicate a Mac keyboard so that maybe Opt/Alt and Cmd can be swapped by default (or we just leave that to users).
I can confidently say that we will never have the default right modifier layout for a Windows keyboard be CtrlCmdOpt (which is what I think a Mac keyboard defaults to.) I believe that matches no existing system and is not ergonomic at all. If for some people it is better due to use of a particular language, they can swap the keys themselves. I think a couple people have suggested this.
Also maybe as part of the first boot Haiku can indicate how the keys work by default and people can try out the normal layout before just switching on Windows mode or whatever. I can easily switch between Windows and Mac mode when I use either system but I prefer the Mac layout because Ctrl is so useful in a terminal. So Cmd-C copies text and Ctrl-C stops a program, as one example. I admit this may be something specific to developers…but at the moment Haiku is probably more of a developer OS and I think long term it could find success in that niche. People on Linux have to go through a lot of trouble to use a Mac-style layout so I would hate to see that messed up in Haiku (though probably no one is suggesting that.)
No. AltGr (Right Alt) just Windows term for Option (Alt) key used in Haiku and MacOS. Plain Alt in MS Windows works differently (it is used for hotkeys) than in MacOS or Haiku (some times). The only oddity is that in Haiku (and BeOS) Left Alt and Left Cmd (Win) are swapped.
Command and Windows keys are completely different things with completely different purpose. Command key is used for shortcuts and Windows key is used to open desktop environment menu.
Having Command and Windows keys the same scan code on Mac keyboards is nothing more than coincidence.
We need to consider that while comparing PC and Mac layouts, Windows Command (Win) and Apple Command serve fundamentally different purposes and can’t be compared. Haiku is on the Mac side here, that’s why it’s best to omit Windows from this discussion IMO.
But Haiku is usually used with Windows keyboard because Mac keyboards are rare and are usually sold with self-contained hardware/software complex. But Windows keyboard are usually sold as generic keyboards separately. So Windows can’t be omitted from discussion.
There are many Haiku users that do not know about and do not use Mac OS, including me.
Software-wise these keys serve different purposes. Hardware-wise, my stance is still clear, assign the Haiku Option key to the physical Windows key to match hardware and software locations. Then it won’t matter which keyboard you use, PC or Mac.
Technically you can use Windows keyboard with Mac OS, but it is not designed to work in this way. So it is undefined behavior and keys can be mapped randomly without particular reason.
Well let us be perfectly clear here, most PC keyboards are in fact:
CtrlWinAlt, which you choose to interpret as above but BeOS and Haiku choose to interpret as CtrlOptCmd, inspired quite a bit by the Mac keyboard layout. In fact this default key mapping then makes Mac keyboards seem “backwards” on Haiku.
Edit: Given the above I think it is not very likely that Haiku will change this default key mapping, which, again, comes from BeOS. If anything we will fix how to interpret the layout on a Mac keyboard so that it is also CtrlOptCmd to actually match the key labels.
