more tibook brilliance: why not just have two keys that do the exact same thing?
apparently it was easier to just make the left-alt and right-alt buttons (and right and left shifts) send the exact same keycode. I’m sure it saved Apple about 10 cents per machine, but it’s made me hate the absolutely ridiculous mac keyboard layout even more. Look, if the key only does one thing, just put ONE of them on there — you could’ve had ONE alt, and ONE shift (that’s right — the ones *I* use) and then given me a real Del and a End.
I have no idea how anyone gets any work done on these things.
On the upside, it’s going to force me to learn the keyboard nav in vim instead of relying on the arrow navigation. On the downside, a proper Del key STILL isn’t present, and can’t be mapped to the nearest logical location (that’s right — the right alt). Guess I’m going to have to have to get my hands used to Fn-Backspace-ing. And Fn-arrowing for the End key.
I don’t even want to get started on the whole right-click thing. Suffice it to say — why does OSX have a right-click menu if macs don’t have a right-mouse button? Being different is cool and all, but not when you’re doing it at the expense of usability (Sure, plugging in a mouse would be a great idea if I wasn’t using my laptop as a laptop).
On the useful tip: xev is the program you want to run from X in order to view keycodes.
showkey is supposed to do it, but 1) it will refuse to run from a graphical terminal (and guess which keyboard layout makes pushing CTRL-ALT-F1 to switch to text-mode difficult? Yep — i suppose good UI means having immediate access to my brightness controls instead of my function keys) and 2) on my deb install it seemed to return the results in hex, and inaccurate hex at that (0x38 for alt, 56 according to google, although the keycode is supposedly 64).
