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

  • From: "Adrien Destugues" <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 22:32:04 +0200

Le Mon, 02 Apr 2012 22:04:43 +0200, John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx> a écrit:


I could add a header to each column showing that the mapping goes from
the "Key Label" in the left-hand column and the "Key Role" in the
right-hand column. As far as the names of the key labels used in the
left-hand column, that is an open question which I am still struggling
with.

I initially chose "Control", "Option", and "Command" to make a direct
connection with the roles, but people were confused. So I changed
"Option" to "Win/Option" and "Command" to "Alt/Command" but you are
still confused. So what can I do? Since the labels are going to depend
on what is on printed your keyboard I can't win. For instance German
keyboards don't have a key labelled "Ctrl" instead they are labeled
"Strg", short for Steuerung, the German word for Control.

That's why the current solution of just moving the keys around on the keymap seems better to me. Of course, there could be improvements to this as well, for example I'd use swap on left click drag and copy on right click, instead of the current solution, since most of the time you want to move keys around, rather than copying them.

This solution provides a visual representation of the keyboard that is rather close to the physical layout, so people can see what they are doing.

Now, I'm not against adding some extra menus to this window, but keeping the visual feedback will make it simpler to understand.

The menu entries could be just something like "swap option and command keys", "swap left option and command", "add altgr key", and so on, not referring to the actual key labels but sticking with the key roles.

This way you need no knowledge of what's actually printed on the keyboard.

--
Adrien.

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