[Magic-dev] Re: Magic Troubles

[R. Timothy Edwards]

Dear Gagi,

> I just installed the latest stable release 7.5.140 of magic, and for
> some reason none of the standard shortcuts work anymore.
> 
> For example when I attempt to turn on the grid with the by pressing
> 'g' the following error is displayed.
> 
> Unknown macro or short command: 'Meta_XK_g'

Philippe Pouliquen sent me a patch that was supposed to fix the
handling of the "Alt" key on Mac OS-X.  Apparently that breaks
something on your setup.  According to one of your earlier emails
(October), you were working on an Ubuntu system.  Is that still the
case?

It appears that you have something like NumLock or other random key
set "on" and mapped to one of the key modifier masks "Mod2Mask" through
"Mod5Mask".  Previously, Magic only looked at Mod1Mask and assumed this
was the "Alt" key.  However, Mac OS-X maps Mod2Mask to the "Alt" key,
so the code was changed to map *all* of the extra modifier masks to
Mod1Mask, on the assumption that the "Alt" key would get mapped one way
or another.  That appears to be an over-reaching assumption.  If, for
example, your system maps NumLock to Mod3Mask, and NumLock is on, then
the new code will make Magic believe that you have the "Alt" (otherwise
called "Meta", as it reported to you) held down all the time.  Obviously
you don't want this.

So, (1) if you have some kind of keyboard scanning program (there's
one you can probably still get called "xkeycaps"), then maybe you
can find out which of the modifier masks is on, and why.  (2) You
can also do this by trial-and-error by removing, one at a time, each
of Mod5Mask through Mod2Mask in graphics/grTk1.c, line 809, recompiling,
and determining which one is semi-permanently active.  Also, (3) you
can try turning on and off various "special" keys like NumLock,
ScrollLock, to figure out if they are mapped to one of the modifier
masks.

> Also I have never been able to start the 3D view, I always get the
> following error:
> 
> invalid command name ".render.magic"

You will need to start Magic with "magic -d OGL" to get the 3D rendering
capability.  I hadn't realized that the "3D window" option remains in
the window when the OpenGL interface is unavailable;  it should be
disabled or removed.

					Regards,
					Tim

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| Dr. R. Timothy Edwards (Tim)   | email: tim.edwards at multigig.com     |
| MultiGiG, Inc.                 | web:   http://www.multigig.com      |
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