Why the "Windows" key won't be supported.

[Olivier Fourdan]

Hi all,

There are a few bug reports about the "Windows" key support as a 
modifier (ie like Control, Shift, etc.).

Until now, it was more or less supported by the keyboard and window 
manager shortcuts editors, mostly as a result of side effects  (see bug 
#1737 [1] for an example of such inconsistency)

Both the window manager and the shortcut manager are able to use any of 
the available modifiers, but still filtering the "fake" modifiers such 
as CAPS/SCROLL/NUM LOCK.

Unfortunately, the UI plugins use gtk+ and (at this time of writing) it 
doesn't know for now about SUPER/META/HYPER modifiers. Therefore, these 
are filter out by the gtk+ routine in charge of returning the correct 
modifiers (ie just CONTROL, SHIFT and ALT).

As the so called "Windows" key is mapped to SUPER, it won't be taken 
into account. It means that you will not be able to use the Windows key 
in your shortcuts anymore (just like you cannot use that key in gtk+ 
accelerators either).

According to this thread [2], things may change in the future. The API 
documentation for gtk+ 2.9.0 already mention the SUPER/META/HYPER modifiers.

Sorry for the inconvenience,
Regards,
Olivier.

[1] http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1737
[2] 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2005-September/msg00024.html
[3] 
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk-Keyboard-Accelerators.html#gtk-accelerator-get-default-mod-mask