Getting Mac OS X to play nice with DEC OS's

Since there seem to be a few people on CLASSICCMP besides me running Mac OS X, I figure the following might be of interest. One of my chief remaining complaints with Mac OS X has been getting X-Windows to play nicely with OpenVMS and other DEC OS's. Normally I use a shell script to start up a xterm with the properly configured keyboard mappings, but that doesn't work under Mac OS X. I'm used to having a fully functional keypad for editing files, and I can't live without it. Well, I think I've finally got it about solved. Simply do the following. Dump your existing keyboard layout (twice): xmodmap -pke > ~/.Xmodmap xmodmap -pke > ~/.Xmodmap.orig Change to the following keycodes in the ~/.Xmodmap keycode 79 = KP_F1 keycode 89 = KP_F2 keycode 83 = KP_F3 keycode 75 = KP_F4 keycode 127 = Select Load your new .Xmodmap: xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap Add the following to ~/.Xdefaults xterm*VT100.Translations: #override \ <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f) If you actually need the normal X-Windows keyboard layout for some reason you can get it back by doing: xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap.orig So far I've tested this with TOPS-20, OpenVMS, and RT-11 and it seems to be working great. I'm not sure if the function keys work right, as I don't really use them, but all the keys I use for editing do work. My only complaint is that it doesn't support double-height text, but it's a lot cheaper solution than going out and buying a commercial terminal emulator that offers full support. Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |