Re: AltGr and XP Powertoys not fixed yet?

[Harold L Hunt II <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

Walter,

Walter Haidinger wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I've installed Cygwin XFree86 4.3.0-25 on Windows XP Professional (German
> Edition, with latest patches) with TweakUI installed.
>
> Unfortunately the AltGr key doesn't work as expected in any X11
> application (no problems except with XFree86). The keys works sometimes
> (that is, e.g. 3 times then not) or not at all.
>
> FYI, the letters @~|[]{}\ are reached via the AltGr key on german
> keyboards. Not having the backslash, at or pipe-symbol is quite annoying,
> to say the least! ;-)
>
> Digging through the mailing-list archives revealed that the XP Powertoys
> are somehow messing up the keyboard message queue. However, the posts are
> over a year old. Hasn't this been fixed yet? I supposed it was fixed
> because I did not find anything in the FAQs regarding the AltGr problem.
> Well, the only fix I've found so far is to deinstall the Powertoys. :-(

Good man: you actually searched the archives :)

> Is there a patch or something else (perhaps a magic Registry entry to
> disable Powertoys behaviour) to make AltGr work _with_ having Powertoys 
> installed? I'd really appreciate this as Exceed would be the only other 
> solution I can see for now.

No, there is not a patch.  Creating a patch would be easiest for someone 
with a non-U.S. keyboard and keyboard layout, Windows XP, and TweakUI 
installled.  The process would consist of looking for all patterns in 
the keyboard messages that distinquish TweakUI from non-TweakUI (might 
have been done to some degree, you would be looking for things like the 
fake Ctrl and Alt keys having different timestamps or coming in in a 
different order, or something along those lines) and choosing either a 
compatible pattern that works regardless of whether TweakUI is running 
or not, or coming up with a way of detecting that TweakUI is running and 
altering the way we handle AltGr until TweakUI is stopped or we are 
shutdown.

Harold