I'm not sure about including the right ALT in ALT_ACTIVE. On Linux, ALT+Backspace removes a whole word, whereas AltGr+Backspace removes a single character.

Lib/_pyrepl/keymap.py doesn't distinguish between right and left (it just has C- and M-), so I'm not sure that was a conscious decision that was made for the Linux code. Maybe that's actually a bug in the _pyrepl/unix_* code?

Lib/_pyrepl/keymap.py doesn't distinguish between right and left

Python 3.14 on Linux behaves differently for left Alt and right AltGr:

• Left Alt + backspace: remove a word
• Right AltGr + backspace: remove a single character

On my Linux, the English keyboard layout has Right Alt which generally works like Left Alt (in a terminal).
The French or Czech layout has AltGr instead, which is apparently not Meta enough, so AltGr+Backspace works like Backspace (in both pyrepl and bash).

I tried on some Windows consoles:

Doesn't look useful, so it's probably best to have Linux-like behaviour here.

I don't understand what you are saying. Are you saying because the existing functionality isn't useful, we should continue to make the right Alt key not be useful in _pyrepl?

Either way, if this is about AltGr, I think we have to really understand how it works in Windows... I don't have an AltGr key, so I can't test it, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key says, "Windows interprets Ctrl+Alt as AltGr," and since the _KEY_EVENT_RECORD doc doesn't show a dwControlKeyState value for AltGr, doesn't that mean that RIGHT_ALT_PRESSED is not the same thing as AltGr and that the Lib/_pyrepl/windows_console.py code would actually have to look for a combination of Ctrl (left/right) and Alt (left/right) (or maybe just lefts?) being pressed to know if AltGr is being pressed, or am I misunderstanding how the _KEY_EVENT_RECORD works?

I didn't know that other keyboards have a right ALT key different than AltGr. In this case, I'm fine with ALT_ACTIVE = 0x01 | 0x02.

I don't understand what you are saying.

Sorry for being unclear!
I meant that the behaviour of Windows terminals I tried (cmd & powershell) is not useful, so Python should not emulate that.

I don't have an AltGr key, so I can't test it

It's a feature of the keyboard layout, not the physical keyboard. To test it you can add, for example, French "AZERTY" in system settings.

I don't know the answer. But why pass the ctrl modifier as a key f'ctrl {key}`, and the alt modifier using a special event?

Yeah, it took me a while to figure out what was going on in Lib\_pyrepl\keymap.py, cause the code is not very readable, but that's what it expects. If we wanted Ctrl and Alt to be treated in a similar way, we'd probably have to make some major edits to Lib\_pyrepl\keymap.py and Lib\_pyrepl\unix_eventqueue.py.