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Re: [MiNT] XaAES:ALT-TAB
Sorry to continue out of topic.
Petr Stehlik a écrit :
1) ARAnyM has no flaws related to Alt+Tab
3) I know that die-hard Atari users don't like ARAnyM so I entered this
thread to explain you that it can/will seriously upset some Atari users
if they find out that the natural keyboard combination for GEM window
switching (Alt+Tab) was not used because of you developing XaAES under
ARAnyM running on Microsoft Windows...
Alt+Tab is a very common feature and very handy, it must be available in
XaAES for the happiness of Atari users.
Problems appears in emulators like ARAnyM where the keystrokes may
interfere with system-wide keyboard shortcuts. This is exactly the same
problem with all emulators or remote desktop clients.
The best solution is to give the choice to the user, through options in
the emulator. For example, WinARAnyM could list all the system-wide
shortcuts (Alt+Tab, Windows Key, etc.) and for each, give a choice to
forward it to the host OS or to the emulated OS. It could be even better
if the behaviour could be specified differently for Windowed mode and
FullScreen.
About the Alt+Tab combination in Windows: normal programs can't trap it,
because it is handled by the OS, and usually it would be a bad idea to
change that behaviour - except for emulators. However, specific programs
can disable the standard behaviour of the OS hotkeys as explained here:
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kbase/WindowsTips/WindowsNT/AdminTips/Miscellaneous/DisableAltTab.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/ms644990(en-us,VS.85).aspx
So if WinARAnyM wants to handle Alt+Tab by itself, it just has to use
this method.
Finally, I will cite another example of a nice similar software: the
Windows Remote Desktop Client. It is just a window to connect
graphically to a remote computer. When it is in full screen, it grabs
all the keyboard strokes and transfers it to the remote computer. When
it is windowed, some keystrokes are treated in the usual way by the host
OS. So people like Helmut (and I) can easily switch to other
applications on the host computer. The designers of that tool choose to
provide alternate keyboard shortcuts when they are intended to the
remote OS. For example, in windowed mode, the shortcut Alt+PageUp acts
like Alt+Tab, but on the remote OS.
As usual, there are plenty of solutions, but since all of us don't use
software in the same way, great software should provide options to make
all the users happy.
Finally 2 remarks:
- In Windows Ctrl+Alt+Del is the only shortcut that can't be trapped by
applications (it is actually possible by writing a low-level driver).
- I wonder how Ctrl+Alt+F1 behaves in Linux ARAnyM...
--
Vincent Rivière