Compose key oddity

[John W]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 4:54 AM, Andriy Gapon <avg at icyb.net.ua> wrote:
> on 27/04/2010 07:39 John W said the following:
>>
>> Is there some other configuration file(s) that are influencing things?
>
> ~/.XCompose
> And also your keyboard layout, of course.
> Perhaps when you press '.' button you indeed get dead_abovedot symbol in X?
>
> What's your keyboard layout?
> What happens if you just pres <dot> <dot> (without Compose key)?
> You can also run xev and see what keyboard events get generated on various key
> presses.
>

I have no ~/.XCompose file, so that's out.

If I press <dot> <dot>, I get two periods, so it can't be a dead key,
it seems. I think a dead key will not register the first time you
press it, if I understand correctly.

Running xev (thanks for telling me about that one!) gives interesting output.
typing <rwin><dot><dot> gives these events:
KeyPress for keycode 115  (which is rwin)
KeyRelease for keycode 115
KeyPress for '.'
KeyRelease for '.'
KeyPress for '.'
KeyPress for '…'    <-- It sees the ellipsis!
KeyRelease for '.'

In fact the DOT ABOVE character doesn't show up in xev's output at all.
And yet it shows up everywhere else I try it.

To my surprise, I haven't yet found a good way to simply print out
what my current keyboard layout is...
Also I'm not sure if there's a separate layout for X and for the OS in
general, I think they're different.

For OS keyboard map:
I don't have anything defined in rc.conf, so I'm just using the kernel
default, I think.
However, looking at /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/NOTES, I see these lines:

    # Options for atkbd:
    options         ATKBD_DFLT_KEYMAP       # specify the built-in keymap
    makeoptions     ATKBD_DFLT_KEYMAP=jp.106

Can that really mean that I'm using a japanese keyboard layout by default?
If so, that seems wrong for me. I will keep trying to find a way to
simply determine what layout is currently being used - there must be
some command for it.

For X side of things, I see this in my Xorg.0.log:
    (**) Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
    (**) AT Keyboard: XkbModel: "pc105"
    (**) Option "XkbLayout" "us"
    (**) AT Keyboard: XkbLayout: "us"

I couldn't find a better way to determine my current in-use keyboard
map. Perhaps there's some command for that? 'setxkbmap -print' had
some cryptic output.

>> This is FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE, with Xorg 7.4.2; X.Org X Server 1.6.1, in
>> case that matters.
>
> I don't think that this is a FreeBSD-specific issue.
> There is a specialized xkb mailing list:
> http://listserv.bat.ru/xkb/List.html
>

Thanks for that link, I'll nose around there.

-John