[Gimp-user] Alt Key

[Thomas Worthington]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 17:29:12 -0000, Olivier Lecarme  
<ol at olecarme.homelinux.net> wrote:

> Could you be only a little specific about these "capricious changes"?
> And what is this "alt-key problem"? From the beginning of GIMP, the alt
> key has been used for some specific uses, for example in the layer mask.

I'm not aware of any interaction with the layer mask which requires Alt  
and mouse movement (only click, which isn't a problem). Moving a selected  
region is a very common action and now seems impossible under normal Linux  
user interfaces. I can see the application of "capricious" to that  
situation. What was the benefit of changing the default drag action?

>> From the beginning of GIMP, it has been suggested, when the window
> manager confiscated this key for its own use, to use Shift+Alt instead,

Shift-Alt does not seem to work with the dragging motion, for me anyway.

> or to change one's window manager. Does it really need to be a
> programmer to understand that, or to change the window manager
> parameters in order to free the alt key?

Suggesting that a system-wide setting should be changed to accomodate one  
application's arbitary decision that all users must use Alt instead of any  
number of other spare keys that keyboards have (AltGr, Windows, Menus,  
Meta, whatever) when it is well known that Alt-drag is used by desktops is  
perverse and lazy.

The problem seems to be with GTK rather than Gimp, to be fair. But it  
would have been nice if Gimp allowed it to be worked around. If it was the  
only problem with 2.4 I would do something about it myself by way of a  
patch, but it isn't and I've just personally had enough with 2.4. It  
offers very little new for a lot of hassle with functions that used to  
work fine.

TW