On Wed, 2022-05-11 at 10:39 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote: > The first thing the intro to gnome 42 tells me is to use the "Super" > key. There is no key labelled "Super". Some hint about alternate > names might help the newbies the intro is presumably designed > to help (experimentation revealed it was the Start key :-). Yes, since we don't use these all the time I often have to look them up (and find conflicting info). And you can can change some of them. Generally, the super key = logo key (it has the Mac or Windows logo on it), though you may need to have configured it yourself, beforehand. Meta *can* be the right ALT key (AltGr on some keyboards). "Alt" gives you an alternate function with another key (depending the system that could be typing an alternate character, or it could be an alternate function - like CTRL and C is copy in many programs, ALT and C could be something like that). "AltGr" could give you an alternate graphic with some keys (used for adding accents to some letters on some systems). The names hark back to a "Space Cadet" computer keyboard, which had special extra keys with those names printed on them. It gets more fun when you have a Mac keyboard, or use a Windows keyboard on a Mac, as the positions of ALT and LOGO are swapped, and you don't know if they'll function according to the legend printed on the keycap, or according to their position on the keyboard. NB: You can have two ALT keys either side of the space bar, two logo keys either side of the spacebar, etc. It's configurable whether they both do the same function or do something completely different. This all harks back to traditional typing. There's two shift keys on the keyboard, the idea being that if you wanted to type a capital A, you'd hold the right shift down with your right little finger, and type A with your left little finger. The same idea goes for CTRL keys, etc. i.e. You didn't contort your left hand into awkward positions trying to press more than one key at a time with just one hand. Then the fun begins with what are third and fourth level choosers, or keyboard modifiers. Taking the E key for example: 1st: You press e, by itself, and you get lower case e. 2nd: You press shift and e, and you get upper case E. 3rd: You press some special key, and another character key, and you may be able to type an accent to add to a letter e, or you may directly type an é with an accent on it. 4th: You press the same special key as the 3rd level with the shift key, then another character key, to be able to type even more special characters. 5th: You press another special key, then a character key, to be able to type even further special characters. The special keys used for third, fourth, and fifth levels is often NOT predefined, you have to set it up in your keyboard options. It gets ridiculous trying to remember the functions of those extra levels, and it's usually easier to use the COMPOSE key feature, for the odd few special symbols that you use. You define some key to be your compose key (e.g. the right logo key), then you tap it and two character keys, one after another, to compose a character out of symbols that look like what you want to achieve (or are otherwise memorable as hotkeys). compose, letter e, apostrophe, gives me é compose, letter e, carat symbol (shift+6 on my keyboard), gives me ê compose, letter c, letter o, gives me ǒ compose, leeter o, letter c, gives me © compose, letter o, letter o, gives me the degree symbol ° compose, letter a, letter e, gives me the æ ligature Some make sense, such as the O and C for the copyright c in a circle symbol. Others don't, such as C and O giving a o with a v above it. I'd expect to have typed compose, o, v, to get that. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.62.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Apr 5 16:57:59 UTC 2022 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
