kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx>]

> On Jul 6, 2015, at 8:17 AM, Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jul 4, 2015, at 2:33 PM, Garth Corral <gcorral@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On Jul 4, 2015, at 2:02 PM, Garth Corral <gcorral@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Jul 1, 2015, at 2:31 PM, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On 7/1/2015 4:17 PM, Garth Corral wrote:
>>>>> The Cmd-C issue may well be a wxWidgets bug, but it is still an issue for kicad users. There are many such issues in kicad where OS X specific issues must be worked around.
>>>>> 
>>>>> As for the window manager capturing the functions keys, yes, that is what I said.  The fact that F10 was skipped for canvas switching means that kicad is catering to a specific platform.  I’m not likely to switch window managers on OS X, nor are other OS X users. Yes we could remap our keys but why should we?  This should work out of the box.
>>>> 
>>>> While I agree with you in principal, can you imagine what a mess our hot
>>>> key definition code would look like if we had to avoid window manager
>>>> key mappings for every Linux WM?  Good luck with that.  AFAIK, there is
>>>> no wxWidgets code for determining WM key mapping so fixing the mapping
>>>> at run time is also not likely.  That being said, if you run into an
>>>> issue, please send a patch with the requisite #ifdef/#endif wrapped OSX
>>>> specific key mappings.
>>> 
>>> So, any thoughts, OS X folks?  It would be nice if the canvas switching had hotkeys that worked out of the box.
>>> 
>>> Garth
>> 
>> Here’s a patch to use Alt-F9,Alt-F11,Alt-F12 on OS X.  Please apply if others agree.
>> 
>> 
>> <osx_canvas_hotkeys.patch>
> 
> Oh, those alt-keys are perfectly fine for me.

And replying to myself:

Macs have the “fn” key which is just another modifier key. Its primary use is on laptop keyboards, where the top row Function keys have various defined uses such as display brightness, open Mission Control and Launchpad, audio volume up and down. By default, the function keys perform those “alternate” functions (which means they’re not really alternate, but …). That can be changed in the Keyboard Preferences (“Use All F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys”). How many users change that preference? I have no idea. But it might be worth mentioning this in the documentation somewhere in case a user starts banging on the keyboard saying “THIS DOESN’T WORK!"

I am glad to help out with docs. If someone would be so kind as to point me in the right direction, I’ll do what I can.

-a