Re: Alt+Esc in Games

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by Troy Unrau on Thursday 22/Mar/2007, @08:07

The Simple Direct media Layer or similar acronym. It's a graphics and sound layer designed for making games, visualizations, and so forth. Not part of KDE, but used by KDE applications on a few occassions.

What is happening is that SDL is telling X that all keystrokes have to go to SDL instead of other programs. This effectively locks other programs out of receiving these keystrokes - which is good when you're trying to hit F2 to change weapons at the same time as pressing ALT to jump... You don't want the run dialog popping up :)

That said, certain key combos should still be able to be passed through to X... CTRL-ESC and CTRL-ALT-DEL come to mind. (I'm not sure how SDL treats CTRL-ALT-BKSP... anyone know?)

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by Carlo on Thursday 22/Mar/2007, @18:52

The real problem is that there's no common, configureable shortcut system, applications have to obey to. One of the big usability issues of the Linux desktop.

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by f00fbug on Thursday 22/Mar/2007, @20:47

Hmm... I think I'll email the freedesktop guys about this, there should be a way in X to configure key combos to be passed through to the WM.

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by Carlo on Friday 23/Mar/2007, @13:48

The question is not X, but abstracting the actions from the key combinations and mapping those via a chosen config (so e.g. KDE apps would use Gnome shortcuts in a Gnome desktop and vice versa). This is everything else than simple, since you need to provide fallback shortcuts or even generate them (or ask the user to chose ones) in rare cases for applications, which use shortcuts for actions that are not available in such a common desktop action-scheme. Also getting all and every application support such a change, will take time.

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