[Konsole-devel] Konsole Bug w.r.t. Alt/Meta

[Greg Badros]

Hi,

I'm finally biting the bullet and trying to switch from XTerm to
Konsole and I think I've uncovered a bug in the handling of the
modifier keys.  I use 3.1.2.

My X configuration uses both Alt and Meta modifiers (as well as Hyper,
but I think we can ignore that).  Throughout KDE, the kde symbolic
"Alt" modifier is mapped to mod1 which is Meta.  kcontrol's keyboard
shortcuts display shows KDE modifiers mapped like so:

Mod     X11-Mod
---     -------
Shift   shift
Ctrl    control
Alt     mod1
Win     <None>

and X Modifier Mapping lists:

X11-Mod    Key 1       Key 2
shift      Shift_L     Shift_R
lock
control    Control_L   Control_R
mod1       Meta_R      Meta_L
mod2       Alt_R       Alt_L
mod3       Hyper_L     Hyper_L
mod4       Menu
mod5       Multi_key

And many KDE applications seem to recognize mod1 (i.e., my Meta key)
as the Alt modifier.  E.g., konsole takes C-M-s as the binding to
rename a session.

However, in my .keytab file, I have things like:

key Backspace +Alt      : "\E[k"

And what I want is for that Alt to be the same symbolic Alt as
everywhere else in the system: I want it to map to my Meta modifier
(mod1).  But it doesn't: it requires that I press my actual Alt key.

Of course, ideally, I want to be able to use Alt, Meta, and Hyper all
in my keytab file as I desire.  Minimally it seems like kcontrol
should binding the Win modifier to either mod2 or mod3 (Alt/Hyper) so
that I at least can use that, too.

I'd love to hear suggestions (or better patches) about what to change
to get the right behaviour for me in the short term.  Using kcontrol
to change my modifier bindings has been very frustrating and always
seems to mangle my Hyper binding, so I'm hoping there's just a tweak
to kconsole to make it honour both Alt and Meta separately.

Thanks,
Greg