Are my two Control keys different?

[Michael Stahl]

On 03.06.20 09:49, Steve Fanning wrote:
> My keyboard has two Control keys, one located at the bottom left and one 
> located a few keys to the right of the space bar. I had assumed that 
> they would be interchangeable and that I would be able to use either 
> when a Ctrl key was to be pressed. However this assumption appears not 
> to be valid in some cases.

...

> So in summary, is there a technical reason why my two Control keys are 
> not always interchangeable?

they are indeed 2 different keys, e.g. with "xev" in gnome-shell i get 
this output:

     state 0x10, keycode 37 (keysym 0xffe3, Control_L), same_screen YES,

     state 0x10, keycode 105 (keysym 0xffe4, Control_R), same_screen YES,

don't know what part of the input stack is responsible for handling them 
the same, but i guess it's the toolkit?