It would appear that on Dec 17, John Andersen did say:
On 12/16/2011 9:18 PM, C. van Nidek wrote:
My last windows free keyboard went out of service. Bought me a new keyboard with some windows (2) keys on it. I am Windows free since Windows 3 and have no idea how they are named. I want to use them and are looking for ideas. Does any of you are making use of these keys and for what?
Ok well first let me apologize that I missed your original posting. But considering that my daughter was in a car crash on the morning of the 17th I can't be surprised that i likely deleted a few things blindly. (the good news there is that she is off the ventilator and it looks like she's going to make a full recovery. Anyway, now that I can again think, see below for more about those windows keys...
First make sure you have to do anything. Maybe they work? On Kubuntu, the Windows Menu key just worked out of the box to pop up the context menu (at least on the desktop and several other KDE apps.) The Windows key (one with windows logo) did nothing.
Now, (I think) we are talking about two different keys. The key(s) I know
as "Windows" keys are the ones with the windows logo on them. And then
there is a "menu" key, which tends to be in between the right alt and the
right ctrl keys. And is marked with a graphic that appears to be a box with
horizontal lines (with one or more appearing to be hi-lighted) and an arrow
pointed at the hi-lighted portion...
But I believe it was the Windows (logo) keys that 'C. van Nidek' was asking
about. And how they work depend on both the distribution and the Desktop
Environment or Window manager involved. According to what I've read, the
windows keys may be listed as "Win", "Meta", "Super_L", or "mod4". I forget
which name is used in kde and xfce, but E17 calls it "Win".
There are those who want these keys to work the same way in linux as in
windows so that when pressed {by itself} the main menu for the Desktop
Environment {or Window Manager} opens. While others {like me} prefer to use
them as modifier keys similar to ctrl and alt. Allowing <win>+<A> to be
assigned to a different function than <win>+<B>... It's been awhile since
I've seen the actual windows keys act like they were hard coded to open the
menu. (I think there used to be a file that I used to have to delete. But
that was back when I used kde3 and I forget the name of the file...
I don't spend much time in kde4, but last time I checked, their global
shortcuts settings tool recognized the win keys as modifiers, as did the
ones in xfce and Enlightenment.
I do remember that like E17 both kde and xfce has in the gui tool used to set
a shortcut, a step where you can type the shortcut you want to assign to a
function. I remember that with kde you selected the function from a list and
clicked on the shortcut currently assigned to it (or the blank field if there
wasn't one) which would expand the line to exclude links/buttons for default and
custom shortcuts. You clicked on the button and then typed the shortcut. With
E17 you click on the button to add a new "binding" then select a function from
the scrollable list and apply changes. Xfce had something similar. In all
three cases I simply held down the win key and pressed a regular key, and the
gui plugged in the shortcut.
This worked the same way on both my desktop and my laptop, using OpenSuSE,
Arch, Xubuntu, PCLinuxOS, & Sabayon linux.
Hope this helps.
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