Carbon.

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an dara lá de mí Deireadh Fómhair, scríobh Aidan Kehoe: 

 >  Ar an dara lá de mí Deireadh Fómhair, scríobh Aidan Kehoe: 
 > 
 >  > http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=m2wtsw9w1u.fsf@Owlbear.local describes
 >  > his motivations for not adding the mac-command-key-is-meta behaviour. 
 > 
 > And looking at the awkwardness that option-as-meta has provoked with
 > Aquamacs and layouts where option is used as a dead key, he has a
 > point--that behaviour really breaks on keyboards where option is needed to
 > generate a character.
 > 
 > But his code already looks at the currently active layout for keys with the
 > control modifier; it should be possible to check if option + key is bound in
 > the OS X keymap when such an event comes in, and to pass the corresponding
 > character to the event handling code rather than option + key. That seems to
 > me to be the least surprising behaviour. 

It’s not practical though, since for most keys option + key generates a
distinct key versus the key on its own in the standard Mac maps. (Things like
œ ˙ é  ® þ ¥ for q w e r t z on the German layout.) And there’s no good way
to draw a distinction between option + 4, which generates € and is necessary
for the user, and option + f, which generates ƒ and really isn’t.

The Aquamacs people approach this in a very ad-hoc way, with per-language
tables--see
http://google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=file%3Aemulate-mac-keyboard-mode%5C.el%24

I suppose though a rule of thumb would be ‘if the character generated with option both:

1. Differs from the character generated without option and
2. Is either ASCII (because our users are programmers) or is necessary to
write the currently active language

then option + char-without-option should generate char-with-option;
otherwise option + char-without-option should generate
M-char-without-option.’ The information on the characters necessary to write
a language is available in the language-specific Quail tables, though it is
incomplete right now. 

This is horrible. 

-- 
On the quay of the little Black Sea port, where the rescued pair came once
more into contact with civilization, Dobrinton was bitten by a dog which was
assumed to be mad, though it may only have been indiscriminating. (Saki)