Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!usc!bloom-beacon!APPLE.COM!alan
From: alan@APPLE.COM (Alan Mimms)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: KeyCodes only 8 bits?!?!
Message-ID: <8909112227.AA29674@internal.apple.com>
Date: 11 Sep 89 22:27:37 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 30

David (dshr@sun.com) responds:

        Are you saying that you have more than 256 individual keys.
        Or that,  through an intelligent keyboard,  you can generate
        more than 256 codes representing key combinations?

        Remember,  X exposes a model of the keyboard that lets the
        clients know the physical state of the keys that are visible
        to the user,  not the virtual state of a keyboard that some
        software is emulating on a smaller set of physical keys.

                David.

The problem really is that I'm attempting to make X live happily within
the confines of an already existing keyboard driver (the Macintosh
operating system).  Users can use deadkey sequences to generate
characters for which they do not have "keys", but it would appear that
the simplest (in fact the only real) way to permit this is to make
X think I have a keyboard with keys for each possible character the user
can "type".

Since there are a LOT of these deadkey sequences, the resulting set of
KEYCODE values approaches (sometimes EXCEEDS) 256.

Aside from the above, though, isn't it a general problem with the protocol
that there is no way to have a truly large keyboard or a keyboard which,
through some magic of its own, pretends to be large.  Asian character sets
are likely to bump their heads on a limit like 256 keys, I would think.

Any discussion sparked by this?