Re: numlock

[Harold L Hunt II <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

JS,

J S wrote:

> Harold,
>
> This is simply a bug report. The FACT is that if you start XFree with 
> the numlock key on, the keyboard doesn't work properly. There have been 
> plenty of other posts about this in the past so I'm not the first to 
> report this. Even if you don't care about it, and it doesn't affect you, 
> I think you'll find a lot of users (who don't necessarily post here) 
> have come across the numlock issue. I know my users have, and everyone 
> agrees this is a BUG.

I don't agree that it is a bug.  I believe that this is simply the side 
effect of changes made to how numlock is handled in the X Window System; 
those changes were beyond our control and not all libraries and 
applications have been updated in the 5 or more years since those 
changes to handle numlock properly.  Thus, anything that we do to turn 
numlock off will only be a partial work-around, not a bug fix.  If it 
was a bug fix then it would apply all the time, but it can't be applied 
all the time because the majority of users that don't use LessTif or 
Motif applications will wonder why their numlock key keeps turning off.

> No one has asked you to do the work for this though - If I can, I'll 
> provide the patch using Thomas' code, but as the one in charge of this 
> project, you're the man who says whether such a patch goes into the 
> build. I was just trying to get some involvement from you, maybe 
> encouragement.

Yeah you did ask me to do the work, you sent me a private message asking 
if I was interested.

I'm not saying it wouldn't go in.  I think it is farely obvious that it 
something doesn't change the default behavior then it goes in almost 
automatically.  I say go for it.

Now, you might still be wondering why I'm not interested.  I'm not 
interested in writing it myself because I spent about five minutes 
thinking about it and came up with various questions about how this 
should behave when Cygwin/X loses or regains keyboard focus.  I also 
don't particularly like changing the keyboard state.  Then I started 
thinking that maybe a better way to do this would be to make a 
command-line parameter that causes numlock to not be specified as a mask 
key.  I also figured that an even better way may be an option on the 
tray menu that lets you toggle a numlock-override during your session 
that just makes numlock look like it is off without actually changing 
the keyboard state.

See what I mean about how I don't think this has been completely thought 
out?  Somebody needs to make this one their own and it sounds like you 
are interested, so go for it.

> I personally liked the idea of adding a flag to the XWin command line e.g.
>
> Xwin -numlockoff
>
> but if you're saying this is a non-starter I won't bother.

I never said it was a non-starter.  I just said "I'm not the man for the 
job" because it sounded like you were asking me to write the code for you.

Harold