The solution comes in two parts. First of all, in VirtualBox’s preferences, set the magic key to something that you don’t hit out of habit a thousand times a day. Just changing from left to right Command did the trick for me.

Second, Haiku’s Keymap preference let’s you perform surgery on the signals Haiku expects from the keyboard. Open Keymap and a graphical representation of your keyboard will appear. Now just pick up the left Option (Alt) key with the mouse and drop it on the left Command key. They will exchange places onscreen. Now you can use the same key combinations on Haiku that you are used to on the Mac to cut, paste, copy, exit programs etc. on Haiku. Just remember to save your new keymap and it will automatically become your new default.

People used to the Windows/Linux standard should be able to use the same trick to switch their Ctrl and Alt keys around.

Of course, one day, when Haiku Rules the World, we will all have to retrain our fingers …

UPDATE: when you apply this tip, all the menu shortcuts change to CTRL instead of ALT. They still work as expected, though.

I spend a lot of time simply editing files and running Terminals in different workspaces, nothing really compute intensive. So, as a makeshift screen-saver, I run Chart full screen, full blast, 100% stars, in one workspace and switch to it whenever I leave the machine. Thanks to BeOS’s emphasis on responsiveness, I often forget that I left it running after I switch back, even though it’s taking up about 100% CPU. I love Chart, you see.

So, as I was putting Chart-shots on the other workspaces, it hit me: since I don’t really mess with the icons on the desktop when Terminalling or StyledEditing, why not move a couple of these apps to the Chart workspace, push Chart to the back, and get the overall effect of an animated desktop image?

Just eye-candy, but boy is it fun.

See also: Toggle between recent Workspaces.

This functions sorta kinda like Windows Alt+Tab task switcher — if you keep different apps in different Workspaces, you get basically the same effect.

Mac users — use the Command key instead of Alt.

This command will actually take you to workspace #5, since workspaces are numbered starting with 0. While it’s always easiest to use the keyboard shortcuts to switch between workspaces, this can be extremely useful if you want to launch various applications in various workspaces from your UserBootscript. For example:

Workspaces 4
Terminal &
sleep 2

Workspaces 3
NetPositive &
sleep 2

Workspaces 0

The sleep commands may be useful to give an application the opportunity to load fully before moving on.

The BeOS has a nice preference panel: /boot/beos/preferences/Menu which offers the ability to set the menu fonts and their sizes (somewhat). You’ll also find a “Color Scheme” entry here which lets you set the background of the menus to a new color (the text will remain drawn in black).

Now for the tip: Adjust this background color in some pleasing way (purists might slightly lighten or darken from the original gray (r=g=b=219), while the more bold will do as I and simply reduce the green value to 29), you always have the option of the “Default” button to get you back to the original.

Any new programs run after this will have the new looking menus, both pop-up and regular. This will make it very simple to tell buttons from pop ups!

Just hit Alt+Esc to highlight the first pulldown menu. Then you can use the down arrow to display that menu, or the left and right arrows to move through the other menus. Sure as hell beats reaching for the mouse!

Note that if you have a 105-key Windows keyboard, the Menu key (just to the left of the right Ctrl key) functions like Alt does in Windows.

In R4.5, the Mouse preferences panel has grown a couple of new options under the “Focus follows mouse” picklist. Enable either of the Warping options and you probably won’t notice a difference right off the bat. But open a bunch of applications and use the Twitcher to toggle among them, and you’ll see what Warping is all about quickly enough.

When you switch to a new application from the keyboard, the mouse cursor will move itself into position over the newly selected app or window. With normal warping selected, the cursor will “glide” into position. With Instant Warping selected, the cursor will snap into position. Another great way to see the effect of warping is to minimize a window and then restore it from the Deskbar. The mouse cursor will glide from the Deskbar to the restored window.

FFM is the source of great debate: people love it or hate it. For the most part, people who like it have spent many years in the Unix world. My thinking is that if you have to bother to reach out and grab the mouse to activate another window anyway, you may as well click in it. Not everyone agrees. Peter Norby (norby@inktomi.com), for example, offers this counter-perspective:

In my case, a lot of times I’m just nudging the mouse from window to window and am not actually grabbing the mouse per-se, so I don’t want to have to do the extra clicking.

What it’s really useful for is when you want to focus without raising the window. If there were a way with click-to-focus to focus on a window without raising it, then there might be an argument.

Also, speaking generally, it isn’t clear whether the click to focus gets passed along to the app or not, depending on OS/implementation. In the case where it does, sometimes the only area showing of an App isn’t something you want to click on, such as the close button.

But anyways, it probably does just boil down to religious choice :)

Roman Filippov (rxf@alkor.ru) adds:

The Terminal shortcut Alt+G to switch between Terminals works only within the current workspace. If warping is on and you have several Terminal windows open on a different workspaces, then pressing Alt-G will instantly bring the mouse pointer to the current Terminal’s title tab. This way, you can hide/minimize/move Terminal windows without extra mouse movements :)

keymap -l mapname.map

There are a number of alternate keymaps downloadable from BeWare and BeBits.

Because keymapping can be a complex issue, there’s a dedicated mailing list set up for people with keymap issues. To subscribe, send a message to listserv@listserv.snakelegs.com with the following in the body of the message:

subscribe BEOS-KEYMAPS Your Name

Replace ‘Your Name’, of course, with your name.

To subscribe via web-browser, visit: http://listserv.snakelegs.com – main page, or, http://listserv.snakeleg s.com/beos-keymaps.html – BeOS-Keymaps Page

What follows are the original contents of this tip.In the “Keymap” app, you can, besides picking a keymap, change the mapping yourself. You can either drag a key onto another with the second mouse button, and hence copy it there, or you can drag a text clipping (max one character long!**) onto a key. Holding down a modifier-key while dragging, you can reach all possible positions. The only things you can’t change with this is the modifier-key locations, the “dead” key flag (I couldn’t anyways), and maybe some other obscure keys (my “|< >” keys for example:(). There is a german keymap on beware though that puts alt_gr right and puts |, < and > on the “correct” positions.If you are adventurous, you can dump the current keymap with “keymap -d>filename”, and edit it, it’s actually readable. After you have applied your feared physical-key-to-hex skills (it gives clues for most keys), you just do “keymap -l<filename”, and you have a home-made keymap!

Also, “keymap -r” restores the keymap to default, but I fail to see the usefulness of this, since if you need to use it, you probably can’t type it in:).

** I assigned “lala” to my ‘q’ key, and when I pressed it, it actually printed “lala”, but it seemed to corrupt the keymap and mouse. However, I’ve been unable to reproduce this behaviour, so it may be safe assigning strings > 1 character in length to keys.