gregoa's blog

ion3's META key

I use a wonderful old original IBM PS/2 102 keys keyboard. I use ion3 as my window manager. ion3 defines a META key [0] for almost all key bindings that are used for navigating etc.
the default setting for META is "Mod1+", i.e. it uses xmodmap's Mod1 modifier [1] which defaults - in the absence of a meta- or a flying windows-key - to Alt_L. -- that's where we're caught in the trap: ion3 grabs the alt key, and it can no longer be used in any applications.

searching on the web showed no usable solution for me (remember: no flying windows keys here), so I came up with my own setup:

1. I looked for a useless but easy-to-reach key and choose Caps_Lock.
2. xmodmap -pm showed that Mod3 is unused. I moved Caps_Lock from Lock to Mod3: [2]
   1. in ~/.Xsession:
      /usr/bin/X11/xmodmap ~/.Xmodmaprc
   2. in ~/.Xmodmaprc:
      remove Lock = Caps_Lock
add Mod3 = Caps_Lock
   3. I checked again with xmodmap -pm
3. then I told ion3 to use Mod3 instead of Mod1: [3]
   1. I inserted META="Mod3+" at the top of ~/.ion3/cfg_bindings.lua & ...
   2. ... at the top of ~/.ion3/cfg_ionws.lua [4]
4. after restarting the session everything seems to work as expected and I can use Alt_L in applications.

update: in some new version I needed to add META="Mod3+" to ~/.ion3/cfg_ioncore.lua, too.

[0] formerly MOD1, cf. changelog, entry from 2005-12-05 23:17 UTC
[1] xmodmap -pm
[2] for testing purposes use the command line instead of the ~/.Xsession & ~/.Xmodmaprc construct: xmodmap -e "remove Lock = Caps_Lock"; xmodmap -e "add Mod3 = Caps_Lock"
[3] alternatively I guess META could be changed in /etc/default/ion3 system wide
[4] cp /etc/X11/ion3/$foo ~/.ion3/

gregoa, 2006-01-23, 2006-07-21