Option/Command/Alt Confusion

Option key (Win). If someone doesn’t need a right hand side Command key, they can change the mapping to Option.

What??? I am speechless.

Can you prove it? I just checked, the MacOS (in VirtualBox) keymap works as I said above: alt=altgr=opt=level3.

It’s pure Haiku keymaps quirks that confuse people.

Explanation

Standard layout of PC keyboard control keys:

Standard layout of Mac keyboard control keys:

As long as we try to accommodate Windows/Linux people, it will be confusing.

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The purely correct thing to do on Haiku is to copy Mac OS (not to be confused with macOS) and BeOS by making right Option key produce special characters. However AltGr has some quasi-religious significance based on how it is used on Windows, and it’s not my place to ruin the quest for the Holy AltGr.

If we were to do that we would have to change all shortcuts for special chars.

In any case, the current “compromise” sucks in both ways.

I’d be perfectly fine with supporting both with keymaps or a seperate win/mac mode for which style of special chars to use :slight_smile:

I do not have any macs up and running so I cannot test it in Mac OS X. But my eyes tell me that left Opt has “Alt” printed on it and right Opt has “Alt Gr” printed on it.

The quirk that confuses everybody is that Haiku calls one key Alt and one Opt when they are the same key on macs and one do not exist on PCs.

Keyboards should work as intended. Not as Linux intend, or Windows, but as the manufacturer of the keyboard. That means my Alt Gr on my Thinkpad should access the @-symbol when the 2-key is pressed, because that is printed on the key. Command should issue commands, alt should alternate, shift should shift and control should control. And my wet dream is to be able to compose characters with the Compose key on Sun keyboards. As intended.

And to clarify again, on ISO Apple keyboards the right Opt is also marked as “Alt Gr”.

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On which language? I have two Apple ISO keyboards with different languages, none have it. Checked online, none of the keyboard visuals with different languages at the Apple Store seem to have such a thing. ANSI keyboards included.

That AltGr on the keyboard is just typing on a button (for PC users). In the keyboard itself, it’s Right Alt, and only Windows OS interprets it as AltGr and MacOS as Opt.

NO, they’re not, unless you’re using US int keymap, i’m using an azerty keymap-fr they behave differently. you can’t print the accents when you’re holding the left Alt, only with AltGr

For those that don’t understand why some of us are saying “right alt” (on a PC keyboard) is physically the same as “alt gr”, here is a link explaining what is sent from a usb keyboard.
https://wiki.osdev.org/USB_Human_Interface_Devices

Notice in the modifier keys status byte, that bit 6 is “right alt”. There is no separate bit for “alt gr”. If your PC keyboard says “alt gr”, it is still bit 6, defined as “right alt” that gets set in the report that is sent to the computer.
It is up to the user to select the keyboard type in the OS.
If your using a keyboard with “alt gr” on the physical key, you can change your keyboard to “English-US” and see that the behavior of “alt gr” is now just like the left Alt key.
Change your keyboard setting to “English-UK” and the behavior will be “alt gr”; the physical key didn’t change, just the behavior.
Hope this helps.

sigh

Would you guys please step away from keyboards? You are disturbing my circles :stuck_out_tongue:

All y’all are most remarkably simultaneously right and wrong on this subject - particularly in regard to Right Alt/AltGr. You are forgetting ISO/IEC 9995-2 according to which ‘bit 6’ key can be interpreted as either Right Alt or AltGr - with both being fully correct, regardless of informal american conventions.

Also, back to pootle.

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Wow, that really stirred your circles, having you un-lurk after 17 years! :wink:
Welcome back?

Anyway, as I wrote before, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around this issue, because my German keyboard behaves exactly as advertised in Haiku (and I suppose in Linux, which I only boot into every other month, usually to be greeted by a gigabyte of updates…).
On-screen-CTRL is keyboard-CTRL, On-screen-ALT is keyboard-ALT, On-screen-OPT is keyboard-WIN-symbol, AltGr works as expected.

If this discussion leads to any changes, I just hope that doesn’t change…
Carry on.

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Nobody on this planet has ever called the Win-key OPT, except for Haiku. When will you and the other Haiku developers understand this fact and that it is the cause of the confusion?

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Exactly this.

This problem has been identified as confusing for decades.

Be has partially addressed this situation by creating a set of neutral names for modifier keys. However, the neutral name scheme derives directly from Be’s PowerPC-only era, which means that the neutral names are more confusing than useful to the majority of Be OS users.

The BeOS BIBLE, pg 57 (emphasis mine).

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As can be can seen from the reference in The BeOS Bible we inherited the term Opt from BeOS and while it may be confusing it’s our terminology and I’m not sure Hyper or Meta is any better.

To fix the key labels we have to first fix the keyboard type detection, and we’ve punted on that problem like Be did because it’s a difficult problem to solve. Sure we could fix just that one bitmap in the menu, but we won’t because we’re waiting on the real solution, and until we have it, we keep Opt there for the BeOS diehards.

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Really, what detection beyond asking the user is really necessary? Linux/Win do not detect, they let the user select a keyboard model. Haiku’s Keymap already lets you select a keyboard model/layout.

If the problem of keyboard detection is intractable…how waiting for a solution to that to fix other things serves anyone?

Abide user settings “now”, add auto-detection in the future, no?

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”, yadda yadda.

(back to my cave :smiley:)

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I thought I was clear, the special cases for keyboard are Mac, and ISO.