Re: Key bindings proposal

[Lennart Borgman]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Jason Rumney <address@hidden> wrote:
> Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> In my patched version of Emacs on w32 you can use the left and/or
>> right window keys as alt instead.
>>
>> Some people here has said that this is just as bad since that
>> overrides the normal use of those keys. I do not agree for two
>> reasons:
>>
>> - microsoft has made it possible to override those keys totally, while
>> you can not totally override the alt key.
>> - using the alt key is far more common than using the windows key.
>
> Your opinion differs from many people on both accounts.

I think ms agree with me on both...

> To override the Windows keys, you have had to use a low level keyboard
> hook to catch the key before the normal Windows input event handling
> takes place.  This is required to catch about half a dozen bindings that
> Windows does not let you override in the officially supported way (which
> is used by w32-register-hot-key).

The low level keyboard hook is the only supported way as far as I
know. There were other ways before, but I think ms dropped them since
they were not secure. (Is not hot keys for a different situation?)

> OTOH, the only Alt keybinding that requires such hackery is Alt-TAB.

No. Alt-TAB can not be overrided by low level keyboard hooks on w32.
That is stated in ms documentation. (I have sent links to this long
ago.)