[XeTeX] OT: Ukelele. Key bindings trouble

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at mac.com
Sat Mar 18 21:11:56 CET 2006


Le 18 mars 06 à 15:57, Peter Dyballa a écrit :

> Am 18.03.2006 um 11:50 schrieb Bernd:
>
>> some of you probably also use Ukelele for personal keyboard layouts.
>> I am trying to use alt-d to get a ḍ but some kind of system wide
>> keyboard modification makes alt-d "delete next word". I have tried to
>> get rid of this behaviour but don't know where OS X stores its key
>> bindings.
>
> These GNU Emacs like bindings are part of Cocoa since Tiger.  
> Outside of Cocoa applications these key bindings are still free ...
>
> I have no idea where to change them. What is Google telling?

I'm surprised Alt-d "outputs" an action instead of a character. On my  
Mac it yields ∂, with either French or US keyboard. I would have  
expected Cmd-Alt-d or Ctrl-Alt-d to actually provoke some action  
(like deleting the next word), but Alt-d to only yield a character.

Which application are you using? Have you activated some sort of auto- 
completion functionality, which would translate the output of Alt-d  
into something else? Are you using Alpha and its so-called Electric  
features? Or Emacs?

Two remarks:

- The Finder shortcuts are accessible through System Prefs > Keyboard  
& Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts. At the end of this tab there is an item  
"Application Keyboard Shortcuts", but unfortunately it only seems to  
allow adding shortcuts for already existing menu commands, not to  
list all the shortcuts used by an application nor to modify them.

- The kind of shortcut you are referring is, I believe, of another  
nature (I am not a developer, hence I may be wrong, I hope somebody  
competent here will correct me if necessary): it is not an OS X  
keyboard shortcut per se, but one of the shortcuts that are part of  
the Cocoa framework used for building applications. As such, they are  
not directly accessible to the user: it's the developer, at compile  
time, who decides what goes or doesn't go in the application, of all  
the functionalities present in the framework; it's also up to the  
developer to provide the user with an interface for modifying the  
shortcuts.

The behaviour you are mentioning (some key combination implying  
"delete next word") seem to be part of the editing shortcuts that are  
present in many Cocoa applications (like TextEdit) with text editing  
functionality: like double-clicking in a word selecting the whole  
word, and triple-clicking selecting the whole line, and so forth. For  
example, in a thread "[OS X TeX] TeXShop 2.09 and matching  
parentheses" on the OS X TeX list on 29 January, Jerome Laurens wrote:

> 3 clicks user action is already used by cocoa to select a whole line
>
> Do things like iTeXMac
>
> one click positions the cursor
> two click selects a bracket group
> each supplemental click: extend the selection to the enclosing  
> logical block
>
> and don't forget to manage the escaped \{ and friends...
> However, there might be a problem in managing comments %
>
> to select just the bracket (and the delimiter in general), alt+2  
> clicks, like xcode does.
>
> In general, the purpose of the alt key is to let the user easily  
> switch between 2+ alternatives.
> Use this and you'll have a consistent interface.

I never saw any documentation of these shortcuts (like double- or  
triple-click) anywhere, and it's generally by accident that I stumble  
on them. I'd really be interested to know whether such documentation  
exists, and where.

Bruno Voisin


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