Weird keyboard behavior with "Caps Lock" key

[Takuma Murakami]

On Sun, 5 Oct 2003 02:13:24 -0300 (E. South America Standard Time)
Frédéric L. W. Meunier <0@pervalidus.tk> wrote:

> Something strange happened minutes ago. I was typing and
> suddenly all subsequent keys pressed showed as capitals, like
> if something reversed the "Caps Lock" key. With it enabled all
> showed as lower case.
> 
> Then I tested in an open rxvt from where I started the session
> and everything showed right. The problem was only on Xfree86,
> and I had to restart it.

It may be the mismatch between the Caps Lock state of
XFree and that of Windows.  If it is the source of your
problem, you could re-synch two Caps Lock states by
pressing Caps Lock for a while (several tries should
be needed until it get fixed).

The Caps Lock state of XFree86 is not strictly
synchronized with the state of Windows.  The former
dominates the behaviour of all X applications while the
latter dominates Windows applications, non-X rxvt and
the LED on keyboards.

As an experiment, when we press Caps Lock key for a
while, Windows takes just one toggle.  However, XFree
receives a number of WM_KEYDOWN messages (due to
Windows' autorepeat?) and it toggles the state
repeatedly.  Thus two states can be different.

Takuma Murakami (murakami@ipl.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp)