[techtalk] Gnomish weirdness (Gnome 1.4, Mandrake 8.0)

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2001 at 03:25:00PM -0400 or thereabouts, Caitlyn M. Martin wrote:
> Hi, everyone,
> 
> I decided to play around with the latest version of Gnome kindly provided 
> my Mandrake, and something really weird is happening.  Somehow, my letter 
> "r" key has been remapped.  Do you know how hard it is to type without an 
> "r", at least in English?  Anyway, this is only in Gnome.  It's fine in 
> KDE or IceWM or any other window manager/desktop environment.  It's 
> strictly a Gnomish thing.  
> 
> Any suggestions???

I've seen reports of this before.

I'm wondering if this is the panel "Run command" binding gone screwy.
In the control-center go to desktop/panel and then the misc button.
There's a keybinding section. Uncheck it and see if 'r' comes back :)
I have Mod1-F1 and Mod1-F2 for menu and run keys. 

<_vicious_> dunno what mandrake does for the keybindings, but for example
ximian doesn't do alt-f1 and alt-f2 but some weird letter things
<_vicious_> I think ctrl-alt-r for run or something

I think _v_ (that's George Lebl, the panel maintainer) is right,
and I think that some distros use something-R and something-M for
these.

Aha. 

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/2001-April/msg00083.html

The followup from me is probably not worth reading, but it's all they
got. :( I note both you and the poster were on Mandrake. I wonder if
it's a Mandrake-specific thing. 

All I can think of is that there's something odd with panel keybindings.
I can't think where to start looking, although I would be interested to 
know whether it happens when you start Gnome from gdm, kdm or startx.
(I know recent gdms didn't look at some of the X dotfiles where
people put keymappings, to the annoyance of those who used them.)

Oh. And if it's a panel keybinding, does that mean it only happens
if the panel has focus? What sort of focus do you have? focus-follows-
mouse, sloppy, or..? Does it make a difference? 

And finally, you mention IceWM, but does it happen when you switch
window manager -within- Gnome? (You can use lots: IceWM, WindowMaker,
fvwm2, sawfish and Enlightenment all work in my experience.) I'm
wondering about sawfish keybindings, too. Could they be interfering?
(Don't use sawfish, though. I don't see how they might interfere,
but it's just a thought in case.)

Telsa

PS: months if not years ago, Gnome got a bug report about "lower-case
N Not workiNg" and "I kNow you will thiNk this is a joke but..." and
indeed, I did, except it seemed such a surreal joke. I'm rethinking
that assumption now :)