[haiku-development] Re: AltGr Key, key_map, and the US-International Keyboard

  • From: "Adrien Destugues" <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2012 22:25:59 +0200

Le Fri, 06 Apr 2012 21:53:22 +0200, John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx> a écrit:


The reason that I'm against AltGr as a separate modifier key is that
it solves a problem that we don't have. That is, on Windows and Linux,
there is no way to enter special characters with the keys you have,
so, another key was added, the AltGr key, to support them. On Haiku,
you already have a key for that purpose, Option, in fact you have 2 of
them. So why do we need an AltGr key?

With the current setup, users really, really expect the AltGr key to work as an "Option" key, and Alt to work as "Command". This means we have one of each, and we don't know what to do with the two "Windows" keys on the keyboard. Either we assign RWin to option and LWin to command (doesn't sound too logical), or we assign both to Option and you now have 3 option keys.

Of course, the symmetrical solution would be better, but the keyboards are just not made that way. There are a lot of other things that could be improved about keyboards : not shifting the keys on each line, not using the qwerty layout which was designed to work around limitations of early typewriter mechanics, and so on. But this is not the purpose of Haiku. We do provide various alternative keyboard layouts like Dvorak or Bépo. If one of them ever choses to have keys as you say, I'm fine with it. But the french keyboards are made in a strange way and we have to live with it, however confusing, anti-ergonomic and non-practical is it.

--
Adrien.

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