[Info-vax] VMS on remote desktops

[FredK]

"Jeremy Begg" <jeremy.removethis at vsm.com.au> wrote in message 
news:4CDB7025.5000504 at vsm.com.au...
> Hi Fred,
>
> Here's my 2c worth.
>
> I have two desktop environments.  In the office I do 95% of my VMS work 
> using my AlphaStation 255 workstation.  The other 5% is on my MacBook Pro 
> which has a second screen.  At home I have an iMac.
>
> In the ofice I always fire up X11 on the MacBook and run these two 
> commands in the xterm window which X11 creates automatically:
>
>     xset fp+ tcp/VMS:7000
>     xhost +
>
> where 'VMS' is the IP address of my local VMS X11 font server (MultiNet).
> I then start a couple of PerfMeter windows on my VMS systems with 
> DECW$DISPLAY pointing to the MacBook.  I also create a DECterm for running 
> some other monitoring software (OperCon).
>
> However I tend to do very little actual *work* in DECterm on the Mac(s) 
> because the keyboard mappings are never quite right in EVE.  (I'm going to 
> try using Brian's mappings to see if that improves the experience.)
>
> If I need to log into VMS from the Mac(s) I almost always use the Terminal 
> application which comes with MacOS X.  I also have a little tool called 
> 'KeyRemap4MacBook' installed on my MacBook, configured so that various 
> function keys and the pageup/pagedown keys generate the right control 
> codes for VMS.  The really nice feature of KeyRemap4MacBook is that it 
> will vary the keyboard handling according to the current application. 
> This is particularly useful because without it the top row of function 
> keys on the MacBook perform various local control actions such as varying 
> the display brightness, rather than generating keycodes for Terminal or 
> X11.)
>
> One thing I'd really like to be able to do is to use an LK4xx USB keyboard 
> on my Mac.  I have tried it but found that several of the keys appear to 
> be complete ignored by MacOS -- they don't generate any action at all in 
> X11 or in Terminal.
>

The KB key problem was a brain fart on my part a long time ago.  Is there 
any low-level HID remapping tools for the MacOS?  There are a couple Windows 
tools like Key Tweak that allow changes in the registry that the Windows KB 
drivers use to re-map HID codes that allow me to work around this brain 
fart - to a degree.  Essentially the PF keys need to be translated to the 
NumLock etc codes.

The brain fart was that I followed the HID description of the keys instead 
of just copying the PC keyboard.