Huh, that's a surprise – in my world, merging the two keys is something I've only heard of Americans doing, and they're normally separate!
On what I think of as a "typical" UK keyboard layout, like the Ubuntu machine I'm sitting at right now, AltGr + letter will function as an extra shift key to change what text character is entered, whereas Alt + letter typically invokes some kind of special function not related to entering text at all. For example, AltGr + F is a way to type the đ character, whereas Alt + F will do an application-dependent action such as bringing up the File menu (in the Firefox where I'm typing this, or most other typical GUI apps), or moving forward a word (in Emacs or Readline).
(I say that only Americans merge them, because in my experience it's Americans who send me email complaining that "Right Alt" doesn't do what they expect in PuTTY, by which they mean, invoke non-character-entry special functions just like Left Alt. I assume the default USA keyboard layout doesn't feel the need to have AltGr because their currency symbol managed to get an ASCII code point. I suppose in principle this might also be true of other Anglophone countries who call their currency a dollar, but I haven't had a steady stream of complaints from any others.)
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Date: 2023-08-05 13:25 (UTC)On what I think of as a "typical" UK keyboard layout, like the Ubuntu machine I'm sitting at right now, AltGr + letter will function as an extra shift key to change what text character is entered, whereas Alt + letter typically invokes some kind of special function not related to entering text at all. For example, AltGr + F is a way to type the đ character, whereas Alt + F will do an application-dependent action such as bringing up the File menu (in the Firefox where I'm typing this, or most other typical GUI apps), or moving forward a word (in Emacs or Readline).
(I say that only Americans merge them, because in my experience it's Americans who send me email complaining that "Right Alt" doesn't do what they expect in PuTTY, by which they mean, invoke non-character-entry special functions just like Left Alt. I assume the default USA keyboard layout doesn't feel the need to have AltGr because their currency symbol managed to get an ASCII code point. I suppose in principle this might also be true of other Anglophone countries who call their currency a dollar, but I haven't had a steady stream of complaints from any others.)