[replying back on list] On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Eric Firing <ef...@ha...> wrote: > On 2013年08月01日 2:06 PM, Matt Terry wrote: > >> So you can have both ctrl-alt and alt-control. Is that a meaningful >> distinction? >> > > In the first case ctrl is a modifier and alt is a key, in the second case > control is not a modifier but alt is. So one probably would never want to > assign special functions to each of these, but they are distinct key > combinations. > If there were three keys, two modifiers, it would be "ctrl-alt-A". So I'm > not sure, but I am suggesting that there may be a genuine reason for > keeping both spellings, and an attempt to go with one or the other might > have unintended consequences. > I don't agree that they are really distinct key combinations, but lets table that argument. I do think that control is insufficiently special to deserve a special case. There should be one (and preferably only one) way to spell control. QT, for example, does have separate "key" and "modifiers", but it always spells control Key_Control. Furthermore, we define a order for modifier keys (ctrl, alt, super), unless control happens to be hit last (though probably backend dependent) and if there are only modifier keys pressed. If someone actually wanted to use key_press_event-s in a significant way, they are going to have to reverse engineer all of these quirks. That seems silly.