Sawfish packages can't read the keyboard under default ubuntu desktop.

[Alex]

Binary package hint: sawfish

I ran into this with the iswitch-window.jl package in particular. When you start it, it gives you a list of windows names, then you type some characters, and it is supposed to pare the list down to the names which contain that string. But when I try to use it under the Ubuntu desktop, it just hangs the session. The list of window names appears, but there is no response to keyboard input. Clicking mouse-1 makes the list disappear, clicking it again makes it reappear, and so on in a cycle. At no time in this cycle is there any response to keyboard input.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Apr 13 17:00:51 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: sawfish 1:1.3.5.2-1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-20.58-generic
SourcePackage: sawfish
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-20-generic x86_64

[Alex (throwaway)]

I figured this out by running the following code under "sawfish-client":

(when (grab-keyboard) (unwind-protect (add-hook 'unbound-key-hook iswitch-read-event) (setq key (catch 'iswitch-read (recursive-edit)))))

Under the default Ubuntu desktop, when you press "n", for intance, this sets "key" to "Button6-n". I adjusted iswitch-window.jl accordingly, and will report this to them.

However, it seems like a bug that this is coming through to sawfish as "Button6-n" rather than just "n".