Alt Gr key troubles in FreeBSD

nocturnal nocturnal at swehack.se
Tue Jul 11 07:44:05 UTC 2006


Hi

I was afraid you wouldn't understand how the problem works. The chacters 
work on this computer, or i wouldn't be able to work daily with it, but 
at times they just get stuck and refuse to work temporarily until i let 
go of the alt gr key and try again. At rare times i can let go of the 
alt gr key to try again but they wont work until after two or three 
attempts. I doubt this is happening at random so i would like to say it 
happens when i type fast and change key combinations fast but sometimes 
it happens when i type slower to. I think it has something to do with me 
using shift just before i switch over and use alt gr, i think i'm simply 
switching over too fast. Actually, now that i said that, i just tried it 
in the thunderbird application where i'm writing this e-mail and i was 
able to reproduce the problem by typing a bunch of uppercase characters 
holding the shift key down and then directly trying to type [ using alt 
gr+8 on my keyboard. What happened was i got no character output for the 
[ character and after holding it for a while i heard a beep, then i let 
go of alt gr and 8 was output.

It's probably because shift+8 is supposed to produce the ( character 
while alt gr+8 produces the [ character so there's some kinda conflict 
when i don't let go of shift fast enough. My theory is that i was so 
used to Windows after years of using it that this happened to me a lot. 
I also suspect that the Windows driver that handles this is more 
developed in the sense that you can hit shift+alt gr+8 but if those keys 
have no kombination in that order it simply takes the last keys which 
had a combination and uses them, alt gr+8 that is. I'm just guessing of 
course.



Med vänliga hälsningar

Stefan Midjich aka nocturnal
[Swehack] http://swehack.se


Erik Nørgaard wrote:
> nocturnal wrote:
> 
>> Well i usually use vim and it's hard to know if it happens in other
>> applications, because i use vim so much compared to the other
>> applications and also because i mostly write those characters in vim. I
>> do use FreeBSD at home to and i can't remember any problems from writing
>> e-mails or chatting on irc. I use rxvt for all my terminal applications.
>> Of course this could simply mean i don't use those characters much in
>> those applications. I used to use nedit, before vim, and i am sure i had
>> the same problem in nedit.
> 
> Well, could you to narrow in on the problem try and test these things?
> 
> 0th: Tell us your keyboard settings in XF86Config (model and layout)
> 
> 1st: List the characters that you have problem with - obviously you need
> a computer that doesn't suffer this problem :)
> 
> 2nd: Try to type all these characters with the correct key-combinations,
> 
> - In the console
> - In xterm
> - In vi (not vim)
> - In xemacs/emacs
> - In firefox or thunderbird - any place you can type
> 
> Then maybe someone can point you closer to the solution.
> 
> Cheers, Erik



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