On Sun, 13 Jul 1997 15:59:48 -0400,
Armen Babikyan <armenb@moof.ai.mit.edu> wrote:
[except from FAQ deleted]
> okay, i did this, but the up and down arrow keys do not work, until I
> get a prompt in X and type "xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc". My question is, why
> wasn't .xinitrc read/executed/whatever? I am using tcsh, by the way,
> would that make a difference? <<shrug>

I don't think so.  It should work.  Something may be wrong with your
set-up.  If xinit doesn't seem to be doing what you think you told it
to do, then it's probably because .xinitrc isn't where it's supposed
to be, or xmodmap line has a syntax error or something.

I just checked the xbase12 file to see what commands are in the
default xinitrc file, and it looks like it feeds ~/.Xmodmap instead of
.xmodmaprc to xmodmap if it finds the file.  So, if you've really
failed to set up .xinitrc file properly, xinit must be reading the
dafault xinitrc thus renaming .xmodmaprc to .Xmodmap should work.

> Also, I have an apple keyboard II, where the option key and the arrow
> keys are pretty far away from each other, to the point of almost
> needing two hands.  How can I change this setting? Unless the command
> key is used in X for something else, I'd like to use command-R for
> middle button, and command-T for right button.

X does not impose any kind of policy in how applications may want to
use key combinations.  Command key, I think, is treated as a Meta key
by default, and some applications (such as Emacs) use Meta.

And to make things even worse, the Option-arrow combination is
hard-coded in the kernel.  You must modify the driver to change it.

> i looked up some stuff
> in the man pages, but i figured i needed "xev" to do this, and this did

I don't think you correctly understand the man pages, whatever they
are...  Xev is a tool to display X events as they occur and are posted
to an X client.  It's not useful when changing system settings.
However, it may be useful to see what key events occur when you type a
particular key.

> not come with the standard distribution, and i didn't have any luck
> finding it on NetBSD/Amiga.

I'd rather get a 3-button mouce.  Supported 3-button mice are
MicroSpeed, A-3 Mouse, and *some* of Logitech MouseMan and TrackMan.
I myself have a TrackMan which works quite nicely.

> This is also nit-picking, but are there any copy-cut-paste commands in
> X? i remember dt having them, and they were fairly useful.

I suggest you get an X book, maybe something like volume 3 of
O'Reilly's big X series.

> I am using the March95 xserver, and figured i should upgrade to
> possibly alleviate some of the problems mentioned above. I downloaded
> both the 960127 and the 950912 xservers, but had problems getting them
> to run. The error messages scrolled by so fast, I couldn't read them. 
> Any idea what these messages could have been? I think I saw one being
> about a device not configured.

Why don't you redirect the error messages into a file?  This isn't
MacOS or DOS (the braindead DOS command.com can't redirect stderr)...

> Would this have anything to do with me running NetBSD 1.2 GENERIC#1
> kernel?

On which machine?

Ken