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

  • From: John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2012 16:58:14 -0400

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 4:33 PM, Adrien Destugues
<pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Le Mon, 02 Apr 2012 22:30:47 +0200, Siarzhuk Zharski <zharik@xxxxxx> a écrit:
>
>> AFAIR it is not so fine in case you select, for example, Russian locale
>> during installing Haiku. That forces Russian keymap as default one and make
>> impossible to use Terminal for any usual purposes (for example to run
>> installoptionalpackages -i KeymapSwitcher). So newcomer is faced with the
>> requirement to solve puzzle "How to change this damned keymap?!". And we
>> have lot of experience helping them with Alpha 3 and this made very bad
>> impression about Haiku for many peoples. In our opinion the keymap must be
>> either hard-coded to Latin-based one or be subject of localization at all.
>
> They are not related at all in the installer. You select a locale AND a
> keymap there.
> The KeymapSwitcher could be made part of the default install, like we have
> japanese input methods and fonts. I don't see a problem with that.

I am afraid that someone needs to build a better version of
KeymapSwticher, integrate it into Haiku as a replicant, and allow the
user to select multiple keymaps at install time to fix this issue. You
could select a primary keymap as well as 1 or more additional keymaps
from the Installer (or ReadOnly Boot Prompt). If you select any
additional keymaps the KeymapSwitcher replicant is installed and
automatically launched at startup for you, otherwise not. That way if
you use just one keymap you don't have to be bothered with the
KeymapSwitcher replicant, which is common for us unilingual US users,
but, if you really need it, which is common for our Cyrillic-using
friends in the East, it is automatically there for you all the time.
Only in the case that you select Russian as your sole keymap at
install time will you have to solve the mystery of how to install
KeymapSwitcher via an optional package afterwords.

Of course Ingo's package manager will someday make the process of
installing optional packages much easier by providing a nice point and
click interface. One step at a time.

John Scipione

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