Re: Physical keyboard events

[Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> My point is that users frequently customize or exchange the positions of
>> these modifier keys, and it is the resultant modifiers that they expect
>> Emacs to report, not the keysyms, in special events or elsewhere.
>
> They should not expect that with these physical events, IMO.

Why not?  If Caps Lock and Ctrl are exchanged, why should Emacs depart
from every other program by not reporting Ctrl when the key labeled Caps
Lock is depressed?  Or, if another key than Hyper itself (which is not
to be found on PC keyboards) is configured to serve as the Hyper
modifier, surely we want it to be reported as Hyper?

The only reasonable manner of reporting these key events is reporting
the modifiers that Emacs will generate in response to them.  The other
correct approach, that of reporting X modifier bits uninterpreted,
yields physical keys that are just as meaningless (ctrl, shift, mod1,
mod2, mod3, and so forth) and with equally tenuous a relationship with
the modifiers that users expect to receive from Emacs.