I’ll bet @jeff_hammond knows this one, but it’s stumping me.
I want to use Option+E for a keyboard shortcut, but it’s mapped at the system level to the foreign character " ´ " (an accent aigu in French, I dimly recall from high school).
Can one turn this off so Option+E can be used in Rhino? (Bonus points if it can be turned off in Rhino, but kept active for other apps!)
~Dave
ha… i have no idea but you also can’t use option + U ,I, or N…
it shouldn’t matter in this case that the option key is mapped to another character in the same way that it doesn’t matter if you use Shift+letter as a keystroke…
the conflicts will arise if you set a keystroke to a combination that osx also has as a keystroke for…
or- option-E is not an osx keystroke (that I’m aware of)… the fact that you get a special character when pushing option+key isn’t any different than how you get a capital E (different character) if using shift+E…
that said, there is a weird behavior when i type optionE compared to say, option+8 …and i don’t know why it does that.
if you open the osx character viewer and press the option key, it will show you the characters you’ll get with it (or any of the other modifier keys and/or combos).
with option though- there are 5 of them that are orange… one of them is the E key.
what that means though, i have no clue
i was too curious so i had to figure out why the weirdness with the option+orange keys shown above… (it’s weird because when you opt-E in this reply field for instance, the cursor turns yellow)
what happens is: type option+one of the orange keys shown above… the next key you press will be that letter underneath the character…
so, to type this: â
it’s option+I first then the A key…
in other words, it lets you do this: â ê î ô û without needing a specific modifier key for each of those characters… all of those were made with one keystroke Opt+I
for these, it’s opt+U (über?)
ä ë ï ö ü
so it appears the five orange option keystrokes are reserved for the system and shouldn’t (or can’t) be used for rhino shortcuts… i’m not sure if you can turn off the behavior but personally, i’d just choose something else if possible.
Using just the Option key as a menu shortcut is not going to work. The Option key is used for adding character accents (among other things), and that’s wired in deep down in OS X. Add another modifier key, like Command with Option, if you want a menu shortcut.
nah… you can actually use option+key as a keystroke without causing any problems… you will have a problem if you try option + E, I, U, or N
(this goes for other apps too-- not just rhino which has more keyboard shortcut possibilities than any other application i’ve used before 
…really, this option+Orange key is the first time i’ve seen a keystroke that won’t work (meaning-- you can’t even assign it in the shortcut dialog where as other ‘bad’ keystroke assignments will enter even though it may cause conflicts)
Such fun, right?
The “Orange” keys (as you call them) are how you add accents to unadorned characters (as you mentioned). When you press Option-E, the OS X input system sends nothing to an application and waits for the next keystroke. When the next key is pressed, the input system adds the accent to the typed character (composing a new character) and then sends that single character to the application.
The other Option key combinations send characters immediately, and Rhino apparently handles them well enough to work with the menus.