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Blog post: The X Window System and the curse of NumLock https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XNumlockCurse
tl;dr: having NumLock on can more or less invisibly break key bindings because 'NumLock' is treated more or less like a modifier such as 'Shift'. And things can turn NumLock on for you, because they feel helpful. All of this is tangled up in how X turns keycodes into 'what they mean', or doesn't.

(Maybe X could do with another layer of translation; keycode → keycap label → actual meaning considering modifiers.)