User:Dov

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(New page: == About me == I'm a very experienced Gtk hacker who have just ordered a N900 == Ideas == === QMod === I got the idea that perhaps it would be possible to simplify the input of Europea...)
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Revision as of 21:43, 16 January 2010

About me

I'm a very experienced Gtk hacker who have just ordered a N900

Ideas

QMod

I got the idea that perhaps it would be possible to simplify the input of European (and other) on the maemo keyboard by stealing one of the rarer characters of the US keyboard and making it into the a modifier key. My plan was to use the "Q" character as it is both rare and close to the other modifier keys. I would then use xkbcomp and turn it into the key Multi_key. To type the character q, the user would have to do "qk" or "qK". Other combinations would be up to the user. E.g. I need to type occasional Swedish, but I don't want to use the Swedish layout. I could then use the following mapping: 

q[ - å
q; - ä
q- - ö

where the positions for [, ;, and - correspond to the positions of the corresponding characters in the Swedish layout.

The problem was that I couldn't get it to work in Xephyr. I did the following: 

xkbcomp $DISPLAY foo.xkb
edit foo.xkb to make Q into a modifier
xkbcomp foo.xkb $DISPLAY

But neither xterm nor vim that I downloaded would honor the multi key combinations. Q would just be a dead key.

On the other hand, if I ran any other program from the my fedora desktop and redirected the output to Xephyr, the multi key would work.

Thus I conclude that Maemo has been setup to disregard this key. :-(

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