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Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 13:08:08 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
From: Jason Tiller <jtiller AT sjm DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: Re: German Win98, US Win95 keyboard --> no ;'` keys in Bash
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Hi, Larry and Hans-Bernhard, :)

On Thu, 20 Sep 2001, Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc) wrote:

> At 01:29 PM 9/20/2001, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:

> >None of these keys yields any reaction at the Bash prompt:
> >' ; ' (i.e. quote, backquote and semicolon)
> >...
> >Any ideas what to look up next, or how to fix this?

> You can check the email archives on this.  I believe it was Jason
> Tishler (sorry Jason if I'm remembering this wrong) that did some
> work relative to the interpretation of keys in different
> environments.

Ah, quite a distinction to be mistaken for the honorable Tischler! :)
But no, the initial whining and subsequent hack was done by me,
though I can see how you might be mistaken.

Hans-Bernhard, I'd suggest looking back through the mailing list
archives for "AltGr", which is how this whole fiasco started.  I
wanted to use the right Alt key (AltGr) as META because when using the
Emacs editing mode in bash, I found my left hand getting very sore due
to *always* having to press the left Alt key for META.  Since Emacs
supported using the right Alt key as META, why not bash?

I originally created a patch to cause AltGr either act as RightAlt or
META via an option in the CYGWIN environment variable.  That was
rejected, so Corinna showed me how to determined the loaded keyboard's
language and use that to determine what AltGr should do.

For English language keyboards, AltGr became META, since we U.S. types
don't often have cause to type accented characters and thus don't use
AltGr often.  If the primary language was anything other than English
(an ID of 0x0409, as I recall), right Alt was not translated into META
and passed unchanged through the Cygwin console handler.  This
algorithm was implemented in 1.3.2.

This didn't work very well because lots of people, like you, set their
keyboard language to English but have their keyboard *layout* set to
something else (German, French, etc.).  Marius Gedman then stepped in
to devise a more advanced heuristic for making the right Alt/META
determination.  That algorithm was implemented in 1.3.3.

It sounds like even Marius' more detailed test isn't working.  At this
point I'm not sure what else can be done.  There were other
suggestions at the time, but I think Marius' was agreed to be the best
tactic.  If this is also failing, I don't know if anything's left but
to rip it out entirely (::sigh:: my poor wrists!), go back to the
CYGWIN variable option, or for me to turn my life upside-down and
switch over to vi. ;-D

I would prefer the middle ground, but were Chris to to nix that, I
guess the next DLL release would always assign right Alt to AltGr and
I'd have to patch each release to get my desired META functionality.

---Jason Tiller
jtiller AT sjm DOT com


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