Applications using SDL will automatically grab the whole of the keyboard using XGrabKeyboard, even if some of the keys are of absolutely no use to it. The code under src/video/x11 should allow for some of the key events to be passed to the desktop/root window. Keys that would have been helpful in my case were brightness keys and volume keys.
Peter, any ideas how to achieve that? The XGrabKeyboard is pretty hard-coded in SDL: 363 ↦ ↦ /* Now grab the keyboard */• 364 ↦ ↦ XGrabKeyboard(SDL_Display, WMwindow, True,• 365 ↦ ↦ ↦ ↦ GrabModeAsync, GrabModeAsync, CurrentTime);•
Bastien, SDL does not know which keys are used by the application, therefore if may and should not ignore keys. Usually games have their own volume control. Media applications are handling media keys on their own and also brightness and volume. Think of xbmc for example. These are very good reasons not to break the current keyboard event behaviour.
I do investigation in this matter few years ago and I found it's a feature. Imagine how wild gamblers felt, if they pressed wrong key and desktop environment interrupted their game :) In addition a lot of games utilize keys that clash with desktop shortcuts. I think the grab could be optional (driven by an environment variable like sound back-end selection). However I can not see any way how to differentiate keys to pass to SDL and keys to pass to other X clients without SDL application cooperation. I propose to keyword this report as Feature request and pass it to upstream.
(In reply to comment #1) > Peter, any ideas how to achieve that? not without grab priorities, which are an idea to have for XI2.1 but far from execution. sorry. you could sort-of get around it by passively grabbing the keys on the devices directly instead of on the master devices (core devices), but that only works now because no-one else does so. It'd be an arms race and sooner or later the same situation would present itself again.
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