05:22 <dnkl> ovf: what does it do?

10:57 <krobelus> I feel like there may a better solution to the virtual modifiers problem. Our solution should be independent of the historical quirk in Gnome; that one could get a targeted workaround.

10:59 <krobelus> It would be nice if the user could say Alt-b instead of Mod1-b; but most compositors don't send the virtual modifier (probably for the better) and I'm not sure if the application is supposed to do a "reverse lookup" of the modifiers.

11:00 <krobelus> need more time to think

11:46 <dnkl> krobelus: we could just implement the default virtual -> real mapping when loading the config. And say "if your layout don't use these mappings, you have to use real modifiers"

11:46 <dnkl> I would also prefer the defaults to continue using Mod1,2 etc. i.e avoid using the virtual modifiers by default

12:07 <krobelus> dnkl: yeah that sounds like a step in the right direction. Given that the compositor is allowed to send either "mod1" or "mod1 + virtual alt", it must be responsibility of the application to recognize they are equivalent (assuming we do want to support this feature). I expect that the application successfully match both to a binding like Mod1+Meta+b would work even though that notation is redundant

12:07 <krobelus> of course. If we canonicalize early, setxkbmap changes only apply after a restart.

12:10 <krobelus> Also the docs say "Modifier indices are consecutive. The first modifier has index 0.". Combined with the spec that says there are 8+16 modifiers, we could implement this equality-comparison correctly for all modifiers, without guessing their names at compile-time.

12:13 <krobelus> There is an argument to erroring out on nonsensical bindings like Mod1+Meta+b but the counter argument is that it it's technically valid in a keymap that maps Meta something other than Mod1

12:14 <krobelus> Again, it's a question of how much we want to support virtual modifiers (irrespective of the Gnome quirks)

22:09 <ovf> dnkl: it just passes whatever i paste into the terminal, \e and all. e.g. printf "\e[3m"|wl-copy and then ctrl+shift+v into a cat running in ghostty, puts everything into elegant cursive