From: Neal Tucker <ntucker@vax.area.com>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1998 03:46:17 -0700

Re: ggiGetc or ggiGetkey?

Andrew Apted says:
> 
> IMHO applications only care about the "current
> modifiers in effect", and not whether modifier N is sticky or locked or
> whatever.  So... can we remove the other three ?

This is not so.  I know of two apps (well, ok, from the same company
which you may consider braindead) that require capslock and shift to
be separated: Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, which admittedly
will probably never be ported to linux.  Regardless, they are real
world apps, and I think this is reasonable.

"So what is this strange 'capslock does not imply shift' behavior," you
ask?  Well, first, you gotta understand the goofy concept of "precise
cursors".  They've given all their tools cute little cursors that tell
you what tool you're using, but are sometimes useless when it comes to
telling where the 'hot spot' is.  So they provide a way to switch the
cursor to a crosshair, which has the advantage that you can see the
hotspot and it doesn't obscure your work.  So there is a checkbox in
the preferences that says "use precise cursors", and that turns on the
crosshair cursors.  However, if you want to temporarily (and quickly)
reverse that preference, you just turn on capslock.  For the purposes
of typing text, capslock still works the same.

Anyway, this might sound like a stupid UI, but I think it's a reasonable
case for keeping the info separate.

> Been bitten by the "program crashed with keyboard in raw mode and
> there's nothing you can about it" thing myself.  Nowadays there is SAK,
> but what I do is add KT_CONS to the TYPES_ALLOWED_IN_RAW_MODE define in
> drivers/char/keyboard.c which means at least you can switch out of that
> console.

Ok, I keep hearing mention of SAK, but I have no idea what it means
aside from that it stands for "Secure Attention Key".  (Before I
got that far, I was starting to think it was a german colloquialism
that didn't translate to english well :-).  Someone want to fill me
in?

-Neal Tucker