"Steven T. Hatton" <hattons@speakeasy.net> writes:
On Friday 20 September 2002 21:14, Mike Fabian wrote:
[...]
But I will never knowingly allow a person who uses dead keys to administer any of my systems. My point WRT the evil dead '~', comment was that a person accustomed to that sequence could be very dangerous on a system which has no dead keys. What happens when, for some reason, an install of new patches changes his keyboard to 'no dead keys' without his realizing it?
New patches won't change /etc/X11/XF86Config. And the problem you describe doesn't happen only when switching between "no dead keys" <-> "dead keys". It will also happen when switching from US keyboard layout to German, French or Japanese keyboard layout. Suddenly many keys, including characters interpreted specially by the shells like '~' and '*' will be on different keys. Of course this can have surprising effects when one doesn't notice. Sometimes I switch to Japanese layout for testing. Then I may get interrupted by somebody and forget to switch back to US keyboard layout when I'm back to my computer. And then, when I start typing with full speed, lots of surprising effects happen ... until I notice that the keyboard layout is wrong. It's especially bad in programs where each single keystroke is already bound to some action. That's why changing keyboard layouts all the time drives me nuts. I don't see any significant difference between this and you dead keys <-> no dead keys. Typing in haste on a unknown keyboard layout will cause problems. You may delete important files or e-mail accidentally. I.e. you *must* take care when switching keyboard layouts. I believe nothing can be done against that. -- Mike Fabian <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。