RE: Keyboard-switching
> Hello friends!
> ==============
>
> Now I have a big question: does anyone of you know something about
> software which allows me to instantly change the layout and
> charset of the
> keyboard while logged in XWindow??? Something like in Win95
[...]
I do not know how to do this in X Window but there is an even better way than in Win95: NT. In NT I can switch from the standard US Qwerty layout to the US-International, with dead keys and all, just by typing Alt-Shift. And this is specific to the context of an application. So when I type mail like now, I can speak in good Français, and as soon as I switch back to Visual C++ I get the standard US layout so I don't have to put up with dead keys like ''' and '"'.
<rant>
I always thought that the keyboard handling was a pain in Linux (and this is certainly also true for other Unices): you have to configure it for the console, then again for X and for X you also have to choose between xkb and the old way (xmodmap?). I never understood the difference between those two. Add to this that even if you manage to type some "fancy" characters, like 'é', 'è', 'ë' and 'û' half of your applications will not accept them, unless you configure them one by one (bash, emacs, pine, ...).
I heard that there's a big overhaul of the display system in 2.1, fbCon. Something that should allow you to configure the display in just *one* place instead of svgatextmode and XF86Config; something that would allow you to develop just *one* driver instead of three: svgatextmode, svgalib and X. I think the keyboard system could benefit from such an overhaul. We would configure the keyboard layout in just one place, a special implementation of X could automatically inherit from the one configuration file. Maybe, while we're at it, we could have a functionality like that of NT with a per process keyboard layout context. Of course we could still be plagged by stupid applications that only accept 7bit characters (but they are disappearing aren't they?).
Unfortunately I don't feel I'm up to that task :-(.
</rant>
--
François Gouget
fgouget@mygale.org -- http://www.mygale.org/~fgouget/
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