On Friday 20 September 2002 21:14, Mike Fabian wrote:
"Steven T. Hatton" <hattons@speakeasy.net> writes:
It would be nice to have a speciall key sequence to switch quickly between key mappings (I believe the KDE actually does support this.),
Yes.
But I don't think that switching keyboard layouts all the time is a sensible solution if you need to input many different characters. You will never be able to type fast, because you can't get use to all keyboard layouts at the same time.
I believe it is better for typing speed to learn touch typing for *one* keyboard layout and enter the other characters with some input method.
But I will never knowingly allow a person who uses dead keys to administer any of my systems. My point WRT the evil dead '~', comment was that a person accustomed to that sequence could be very dangerous on a system which has no dead keys. What happens when, for some reason, an install of new patches changes his keyboard to 'no dead keys' without his realizing it?
For example, I always use the US keyboard layout and usually type German in XEmacs in iso-accents-mode, i.e. I type "o and XEmacs converts that to ö. Similar to dead keys. You can also use compose for that. For example, if the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose contains
<Multi_key> <o> <colon> : "ö" odiaeresis
and you have mapped some key to Multi_key, you can use that to input unusual characters.
Here's an example of the kinds of things I would like to be able to do. I often want to explore the meaning of words with others on mailing lists. One excelent resource is here: http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE422.html Notice the several non-standrd characters which are represented using <IMG/> tags. I would like to be able to enter such characters without having to browse through picklists, then copy and paste. Having a 'cheat sheet' available would lessen the burden. It may be in intrem solution until a 'correct' solution somes along. I do use the compose for Á,Ó,Ú,Đ,Þ.Ö, etc. When I looked through the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose file I saw that many of the characters requier dead keys. That's what got me talking about the dead '~'. I'm certain it is an omen that shortly thereafter, I learned that eshell thinks "~" == ~. I had put ~/something in a ./configure option and it missunderstood it to think I meant '~' and created $PWD/~ . Well I did rm -r "~". I'm still in shock. :-o I guess I don't need the dead key combos for much, righ now. What would be nice is some kind of escape sequence which would allow me to enter <super-escape-key-combo>[unicode hex representation] and out comes the exact character I'm looking for. Another option might be to hijack the number pad for custom key mappings. Have some way of putting the keyboard input mechanism into a special mode where the number pad keystrokes result in entering characters from your customized mapping. I envision this having a the following features: * a configuration mode. ** Some speciall key sequence would put the keyboard into pallet configuration mode . (or clicking an icon, etc) ** The user would have a display of all the UTF characters with the associated UTF hex codes. UCM seems to work for this, (but it's ugly as raw X). ** The user would have a pallet representing the number pad in which to copy the chosen character. Alternatively, the user could enter the exact hex representation of the character into a 4-character field. ** This should probably have a means of constructing multiple pallets, and a means of switching between them. * a use mode. ** Some special key sequence could be used to put the keyboard into pallet use mode. **Some kind of obnoxious indication that it is in pallet mode, - at least for newbies - with a message telling the user how to turn it off. **A means of switching between pallets. **A visual representation of the active pallet. (A diagram which looks like the number pad) **This should have a way of shifting case where the default would be 'natural'. A brief scan of the Unicode character sets indicates to me lower case is distinguished form upper case by setting the LSB. Of course, the original ASCII breaks this. In general a more user friendly means of learning the the compose keystrokes would be nice. My current KDE installation has a 'help' button in the 'Keyboard - KDE Control Module' which does absolutely nothing. This may be a result of my having installed the latest KDE rpms off the SuSE ftp server. Thngs don't always work on the bleeding edge. Nonetheless, I have found learning how to use the various keyboard configurations to be quite difficult. I'm finally catching on. I believe the combination which is right for me is: hattons@ljosalfr:~> locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE=POSIX LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL= Geeko Cogwheel -> Preferences -> Peripherals -> Keyboard -> Enable keyboard layouts=t Keyboard Model = Generic 104-key PC Primary Layout = [en-US Flag] U.S. English w/ ISO9995-3 Primary Variant = basic But I have no idea what these settings really mean. It's probably not that hard to understand, but without any documentation, it is not very easy to learn. One thing I don't really understand is why not simply have some kind of escape key for dead keys. Or is that what [M ~] really is? STH --