2006-08-22 06:57 UTC

Substituting for the Alt key

Ion uses the Alt key as modifier for most of its bindings. How to change this?

Actually, Ion uses X's Mod1 modifier, not Alt. This Mod1 modifier just is normally bound to Alt on XFree86/Xorg/IBM PC platforms. On Sun workstations it is more often bound to the diamond key, and there's no overlap on them with programs that specifically look up the modifier corresponding to Alt.

Ion by default uses Mod1 partly for this reason, and partly because it is likely to be bound somewhere on every X server, unlike other modifiers. There are two ways to make Ion not use Alt:

Use xmodmap to bind Mod1 to some other (e.g. Super_L). This may, however, leave overlap with apps that themselves want to use Mod1.
Look up another modifier symbol bound to some other key. Mod3 is often bound to Super_L, which again stands for the left flying window key. These may also be Mod4 and Hyper_L, and so on; check by running xmodmap (without arguments). Note that the the modifier configuration of some X releases is broken by default, so you might need to do some fixing.

Then copy over cfg_ion.lua in ~/.ion3/, if you have not already done so, and at the top, change the line with META to read
```
 META="Mod3+"
```
(Don't forge the plus sign; this is simply a Lua side variable concatenated to the base keys to form the actual key specification.) For more information, see the configuration manual.

You might also be able to use some other key in some applications, such as the popular case of irssi.