Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 54295
Sawfish Bindings modifier of -control- breaks xterm menus
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:37:28 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.7-2 i686) Description of problem: After installing Red Hat 7.2 Beta (Roswell) and logging in under GNOME, I could not hold down the Left Ctrl key and use the mouse buttons over an Xterm to access the menus. The key binding for sawfish, accessable in GNOME->Programs->Settings->Desktop->"Window Manager"->"Run Configuration Tool for Sawfish"->Bindings (say that three times fast!), were initially set to use "control" as the modifier key. This default interrupts normal use of control in other applications such as Xterm. I tried changing the modifier to "alt", and this brought back my Xterm windows, but I could no longer access the Sawfish controls with LeftAlt-MiddleMouseButton. I settled on "shift" because I do not use any applications that require LeftShift-MouseButton actions, and this seemed to give me access to both the Xterm menus and the Sawfish menus. I was also confused by the existance of both the path above (to bindings) and a separate path of GNOME->Programs->Settings->"Sawfish window manager", which does not have a Bindings entry. It took me a while to determine that there was another place I could configure Sawfish and locate the Bindings controls. "Bindings" is also missing if I use the Nautilus "Start Here" program and access Preferences:///Sawfish. I would prefer a single interface to configuring the window manager rather than several, or at very least, to see all of the configuration options consistently available through all interfaces. The Bindings controls are too deeply buried in menus. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install RedHat 7.2 beta 2. Launch Gnome 3. Hold Ctrl and Right Mouse Button Actual Results: No menu Expected Results: VT Fonts menu should appear. Additional info:
I would agree on the complexity of the config interface. Working on that. The control key is not actually our default; instead, for some users who upgrade, Sawfish decides to switch to control (we ship with alt). The problem hasn't been tracked down yet. For fresh user accounts it should be alt.
Hate to break this news: This was on a new install, not an upgrade. It was a "Custom" install though; perhaps the bug is something common to Custom/Upgrade installs but different from Server/Workstation installs?
Wait, I take that back. It was a new install, BUT my account is NFS mounted from another box. It probably picked up and upgraded that when I started GNOME and changed it to control. Sorry for the confusion. OK... so it's a strange upgrade issue.
Right, the issue is that some old version of Sawfish wrote something weird in a config file in your home directory, that somehow causes the new version of Sawfish to switch to alt. Twilight zone. ;-)
I meant "switch to control" obviously, sorry.
*** Bug 50259 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Sawfish is no longer the default WM, and I believe now defaults to almost no keybindings.