Alright, I got a new laptop at work this week. It’s a Macbook Pro. Traditionally, I’ve avoided Macs but there were some compelling advantages to getting one in the current situation I am in. I’ll talk about that in a future post.
Anyway, when I switched to Mac I also decided to switch from VNCServer on my Linux box to an NXServer. Setting up NXServer actually proved a bit easier than when I first tried to setup VNC on that box about 2 years ago. The config file is much easier to understand. It’s also easier to switch desktops with NXServer. So, there are many advantages to the switch. NXServer is also faster than VNC, even when running over the local network.
Anyway, I discovered an interesting problem that Nomachines claimed they had fixed. What would happen is if I went into Konsole and tried to use the asterisk, it would think that I was using the shortcut to switch between konsole windows (defaults to shift-left/right arrow). I thought perhaps there was something wrong with my key mapping (I checked using ‘xmodmap -pk’). Everything checked out fine there. I tried updating X11, modifying the NXServer settings and anything else I could think of. I couldn’t figure it out.
At that point, I decided that I would try and just avoid using the asterisk in the first place. That didn’t last long at all. The first time I tried to “grep -r ‘i’m a loser’ *” I realized that life as I know it would cease to exist without an asterisk.
As a desparate measure, I went into the Konsole config and just disabled those shortcuts and now I am happy as can be. If I go into Konsole and try and customize those using ‘shift-left’ it thinks I input ‘shift-+’. When I use ‘shift-right’ it thinks I typed in ‘shift-*’. Using ‘shift-<’ and ‘shift->’ seem to work just fine.
Silly me. I completely forgot that by using “shift->” and “shift-” I would have problems while coding. Instead, I’m using “alt->” and “alt-<“. That should not interfere with anything any normal user would do.
Mac = fun :]