GEdit - can't select text with keyboard

[Johnny Rosenberg]

2010/2/14 Johnny Rosenberg <gurus.knugum at gmail.com>:
> 2010/2/13 Karl F. Larsen <klarsen1 at gmail.com>:
>> Robert Spanjaard wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:41:21 +0100, Johnny Rosenberg wrote:
>>>
>>>> I have recently installed Ubuntu 9.10. Before that I had the now very
>>>> old Ubuntu 8.10. With Ubuntu 8.10 GEdit 2.24.0 is the default text
>>>> editor, in Ubuntu 9.10 it is GEdit 2.28.0. My wife still use GEdit
>>>> 2.26.1 on Ubuntu 9.04, so I have three different versions to compare to
>>>> each other.
>>>>
>>>> I just opened GEdit for the first time since I installed Ubuntu 9.10 and
>>>> I noticed that I can no longer select text with Shift+→, Shift+↠,
>>>> Shift+↓ etc. It seems like Shift+→, for example, behaves exactly like
>>>> →,
>>>> that is moving the cursor forwards.
>>>>
>>>> I just asked my wife to test this on her computer (Ubuntu 9.04, GEdit
>>>> 2.26.1, just like I mentioned above), end Shift+→ works perfectly for
>>>> her.
>>>>
>>>> Is this a difference between GEdit 2.28.0 and 2.26.1 or is there a
>>>> setting that went wrong in my case?
>>>>
>>>> I can still select text using the mouse, but I find that very
>>>> inconvenient.
>>>
>>> Seems to be a setting somewhere. I'm using the same version of Ubuntu/
>>> gedit, but the keyboard selection still works.
>>>
>>
>>        Yes if you start gedit and then select help they tell you all about
>> setting up keyboard selection at least on 10.04
>
> No, it doesn't provide anything useful for this matter (GEdit 2.28.0).
>
> Johnny Rosenberg
>

I found the reason for my problems. Unfortunately I didn't find a way
to solve it…
I have my own keyboard layout which I created myself by adding stuff
to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/se, /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.lst
and /usr/share/X11/xkb//rules/evdev.xml.

One of the features of my layout is that I can use my arrow keys for
typing arrows, like ←↑↓→⬄↹↔⇨, using the AltGr (Right Alt) with or
without the Shift key.

For example, in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/se, which defines my own
layout as a variant of the Swedish layout, the right arrow key is
defined like this:
key <RGHT> {[Right,                Right,                rightarrow,
        U21E8                ]};

The four elements within [{}] stands for what happens if we press the
key alone, with Shift, With AltGr and with Shift+AltGr. Right means
move the cursor right, rightarrow means the symbol → and U21E8 means
the hexadecimal code for the Unicode character ”⇨”. So it seems like I
need to find out what to replace the second ”Right” with to make it
work. Unfortunately I don't have a clue what it could be, if something
like that even exists.

I searched in that folder for other files containing ”<RGHT>” and I
found quite a few, but all of them was done like this:
key <RGHT> {    [Right ]    };

It seems like that line means something like ”The usual right arrow
key function”.

One funny thing I found was that I can actually highlight text in some
other applications, like OpenOffice.org for instance, but not in Gedit
or Tomboy. I can do it in my web browser though (Opera). Seems like
some applications do things like that differently.

So I guess I have to write a new thread now about how to solve this.
I guess that the question marks below displays what I'm looking for,
in case anyone reads this and know the answer:

key <RGHT> {[Right,                ?????,                rightarrow,
        U21E8                ]};

This is what I want to obtain:
→: Move cursor one step to the right
Shift+→: Move cursor one step to the right and highlight
AltGr+→: Type a ”→”
Shift+AltGr+→: Type a ”⇨”