[xmonad] My ALTernative revelation

[Brent Yorgey]

On Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 07:31:07PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 03:20:19PM -0400, Brent Yorgey wrote:
> > My laptop has no windows key, so for the past year or so I've just
> > been using alt as mod, and dealing with the fact that I can't use some
> > shortcuts involving alt in various applications (emacs, irssi, etc.).
> > Then just today I realized that I can map my left and right alt keys
> > separately!  So I mapped left alt to Mod3 and use that as my mod key,
> > and the right alt key went on happily being good old alt.  Now I can
> > once again use all those alt shortcuts.
> > 
> > Now I also feel dumb. So I thought I would share just in case anyone
> > else hasn't figured this out either. =)
> 
> my clicky old ibm model m has no windows key, so I mapped the
> caps-lock as mod leaving me with no collisions with the alt key. Plus
> I have no caps-lock key anymore avoiding the tYPICAL pROBLEM tHERE.
> 
> I liked it so much that now all my keyboards are mapped that way :)
> 
> A

This is a good idea, and I actually tried this a while ago, but there
were some key combinations with caps-lock that my keyboard generated
no events for.  This is when I learned that in order to save
space/materials/money, keyboards are constructed in such a way that
there are quite a few key combinations between which the hardware
can't tell the difference, since there is not a dedicated wire for
each key. 

Anyway, I at least have caps-lock unmapped.  =)

-Brent