Old TestAlt utility fails on RPi4

I like to have the old !Calc calculator available for doing just simple arithmetic where !SciCalc is really overkill.

I had modified it to optionally use my TaskCheck utility to prevent multiple instances being inadvertently loaded, but then found that there were occasions where having more than one copy loaded was useful – just to “remember” the result of one calculation whilst embarking on another.

To do this I used the TestAlt utility I had found many years ago. Thus I could arrange for subsequent copies to load (only) if I had the Alt key pressed.

Moving to the RPi4, I find that this utility no longer works, but Fred Graute’s TestACS, a more versatile version but a drop-in replacement, does still work.

So for anyone doing similar things with modifier keys, I recommend using Fred’s TestACS available from here under the “other software” link.

In the past I used routines from the ‘Bits’ module (whose?), but that was 26-bit.

Not so long ago I had a need for something similar, but Fred’s Utilities have an API that did not suit, so I wrote something of my own.

I have extracted it from the app as ModKeys

It is a tiny BASIC utility that creates a code system variable that returns the state of the 6 modifier keys as binary string. From there you can evaluate it in Obey files to test for all combinations of keys.

I offer it because I have not seen this problem tackled this way.

In the past I used routines from the ‘Bits’ module (whose?)

Brian Brunswick apparently.
One citation in this readme