The right Option key retains its normal function, and can be used to enter special characters at the keyboard-ironically the Meta key's original purpose. This patch enhances our Terminal app to function like macOS': It adds a configuration option to the "Settings." dialog that, when enabled, causes the left Option key (only) to function as a Meta key. MacOS' Terminal app doesn't emulate the Meta key by default, but does provide a setting that makes the Option keys function as Meta keys. Consequently terminal emulators often provide a means of disabling menu shortcuts, as do the emulators included with GNOME and Xfce. This creates a conflict as the Alt keys are also used to access application menus on these platforms. Terminal emulators on Windows and Linux (on PC) normally interpret the Alt keys as Meta keys. (Python's interactive shell uses readline, for instance.) These applications use the Meta key as a "command" key and provide additional editing features when it's available. See the Wikipedia article on the subject for more.Īlthough the Meta key is absent from modern keyboards, two major pieces of UNIX software still rely on it being present: GNU Emacs and the GNU readline library, which is used by bash and a wide variety of other software to read input from the terminal. Terminal emulators often provide a means of switching between these two behaviours, either setting the high-order bit or prefixing characters with Escape. Since this functionality did not generalize well-not all serial connections support eight-bit data and not all character encodings use eight-bit characters-applications began also recognizing the Escape character as a signal that the next character should be interpreted as having been modified by the Meta key. Its purpose was to give users an easy way of entering special characters: When held down it caused the eighth bit to be set on all characters read from the keyboard, allowing access to the "extended" portion of the ASCII character set (character codes above 127). I'll be uploading a patch that does this by allowing the left Option key to be used as a Meta key, but since I expect this may need a bit of context I'm also adding this ticket to provide some background.Ĭertain early workstation keyboards included a key labeled "Meta" that functioned as an extra modifier key alongside Shift and Control. Terminal should be enhanced to support this. Currently Terminal provides no mechanism for emulating a Meta key, which makes it difficult to use certain console-based UNIX applications under Haiku.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |