Le Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:50:12 +0200, kirilla@xxxxxxxxxx <jonas@xxxxxxxxxxx> a écrit:
- The keyboard layout appears to be auto detected ("Swedish Pro")
and is selected in the list of "Input Sources" available in one of
the tabs of the "Language & Text" preflet.
- There is, IIRC, an install-time dialog asking the user a few simple
questions about the keyboard if one has connected a keyboard
that OS X doesn't know how to auto detect.
The thing is, only mac keyboard can be detected this way (as far as I know). There is a language field somewhere in usb hid descriptor, but keyboard chips are hardwired to some default value.
- When input device locale (keymap) detection is not possible Haiku should offer sufficient configurability.
ReadOnlyBootPrompt lets you select a keyboard layout. I think there's no real need for a wizard asking to press some keys, people know about their keyboard.
I use a Mac keyboard with my Haiku PC, to standardize on some resemblance of order, but it breaks down with Haiku, and switching between 4 dissimilar keymaps is horribly unfriendly. (I think Haiku's Mac keymaps are broken. Pressing the clover key shows up in Haikus Keymap preferences as alt being pressed. There are also issues with <> and §°. I should file a bug report.)
This is actually an hardware problem. Apple, at some point, decided to swap the keycodes of option and command. I don't know why (nor when), but the result is that in Haiku they are now mixed up.
I think Haiku applies PC key locations to Mac keyboards, where a lot of characters reside in other places, making it a larger issue than merelythat of swapping the modifier keys. It's similar, mentally, to finding myselfwith a US keymap on my Swedish keyboard, but more severe.
I don't know about swedish, but at least for French the so-called "Mac" keymap is available in Haiku. It matches Apple keyboards, as well as Amiga ones, and is close to many other computers (Atari ST, some 8-bit ones, ...). The "PC" style keymap is rather different, but because PC are very common now, it seems to be the current "standard". The "Mac" one has no AltGr key, and needs rather annoying combos involving alt+shift (or option+shift) to reach most special chars ( {[]}~| commes to mind).
They are different keymaps and thus we have two different configs in Haiku for them.
I don't care so much about the choice of bitmaps, symbols or text in the shortcut legends on the menu options, but I do care very much about the keyboards working reasonably uniformly, regardless of what system I'm interfacing, being true to the keyboards physical appearance and working reasonably the same across different operating systems.
I'm switching between Haiku with Alt as command key, and Windows where Ctrl is (mostly) the same. And I sometimes use a mac with pc keyboard, which is about as confused. But I got used to switching and I'm fine that way.
-- Adrien.
