OK, I think I fixed that. Now the canvas always gets all keys, including arrows, space, esc etc. (i.e. not only global verb shortcuts) so long as the document window has focus. This closes a sore "known problem" from 0.36 release notes.
I'm not sure if my fix is "correct" but it seems to work. Previously, event contexts received events only from the "acetate" item on the canvas (this is an invisible item covering the entire canvas), and this item obviously can only have focus when mouse is over it. We have tried putting event grab on the canvas widget, but this apparently did not affect the acetate which, not being a GTK widget, cannot have a grab. My solution is simply to call sp_desktop_root_handler() from within the sp_desktop_widget_event() handler (which receives all desktop widget events regardless of mouse position) but only for GDK_KEY_PRESS events and only if the desktop's canvas has no current item (because in that case, an item handler must be called instead of root handler, and I don't need to do that anyway because this can only happen when the mouse is over the canvas).
Please test the program thoroughly. This change may well have broken something I did not notice.
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