Windows, Logo, Flag, Super, Hyper, Meta (whatever the heck this key is)

Well I have been doing some more research into keys and what I have been calling the Super key (and most people seem to call the Windows key) has an interesting history in Linux. In UNIX there was actually a dedicated Super key (as well as Hyper and Meta) but with the advent of “modern” PC keyboard that only had Ctrl and Alt support for Super, Hyper and Meta was largely forgotten about until the mid 1990s when the 95/98 era Windows PCs became popular and they had a “Windows” key. Quite quickly this was adopted as the Meta modifier in the early Linuxes but it seems to have been switched at some point to be the Super key with Meta being interchangeable with the left-Alternate key for many programs. So what I have been calling Super was actually being called Meta by everone else when I first started using non-Amiga or BBC computers and isn’t an official/original Super key anyway. Super.

All of that is interesting but not very useful to RISC OS users—thus far I have only found one program that responds to this key, which is Writer+ and pressing the key opens an HTML page containing the built-in help.

Anyone else use this key for anything special?

Users can themselves assign functions to the ‘flag’ key using the Keyboard plug-in in Configure.

StrongMen 1.27 uses this key as a modifier key (through the DeepKeys and StrongKeys modules). If/when I modify StrongED to use those modules it too will support the use of this key as a modifier key.