[haiku-development] Re: About native keymap switching solution. (Was: Looking for feedback on enhancements for dealing with Mac keyboards with Haiku)
- From: John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2011 18:40:18 -0500
On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Siarzhuk Zharski <zharik@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Am 13.10.2011 19:32, schrieb John Scipione:
>
> In all seriousness I'd like to hear more about this native keymaps
> switching solution.
>
> It may be strange to hear for lating-languages speaker but the first
> question in the cyrillic world about Haiku is "Hey, dude, how can I switch
> keymaps here?" At the moment we have to use the ancient utility from the
> BeOS ages. Its name is KeymapSwitcher, it was written more than 12 years
> ago and has long, troublesome existence and croocked way of life. It's
> design is rather eccentrical - the input filter watches for key events and
> send corresponding switch messages to the replicant in Deskbar that
> overwrites the ~/config/settings/Key_map file and forces input_server to
> reload current keymap. Because of such "unoptimal" design it has no chance
> ever to settle in the Haiku tree.
>
It sounds like what we need is to add the ability to have multiple keymaps
and have a key combination to switch between them. On Mac OS X you do this
by Command + space... which doesn't work very well because that is also
used by Spotlight, but I digress. Of course the problem with a key combo is
that the keys you press could change when you changed your keymap...
perhaps we could hard code something for this.
>
> Another problem this package tries to solve is shortcuts mapping. Haiku
> has inherited from BeOS the character-based shortcuts and user have to
> press different keys combinations on different keymaps for the same
> shortcut. Many people found this annoying - because this breaks the whole
> idea of shortcuts as "muscle memory using". And needless to say that
> cyrillic keymaps have no latin characters at all so russian guys are not
> just annoyed but in the great fury. To calm them, KeymapSwitcher select one
> of configured keymaps as "base" one and use it to substitute shortcut
> characters on the fly in the input filter so they looking like from
> latin-based keymap.
>
Well, the ability to switch the shortcuts is useful as well. The more I dig
into this the more I think that the modifier keys should be configured
separately from the rest of the keymap.
> I hope you like the story. :-)
>
I do not, but user frustration is a good incentive to make the keymaps work
better. There is certainly room for improvement here. I seems as though I
have opened a quagmire.
John Scipione
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