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From: stripes@eng.umd.edu (Joshua Osborne)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: PC/AT Keyboard X Keysym Proposal - R.F.C.
Message-ID: <1991Jan11.024505.10576@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 11 Jan 91 02:45:05 GMT
References: <9510@scolex.sco.COM> <9101101641.AA06324@iris49.biosym.com>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (C-News)
Reply-To: stripes@eng.umd.edu (Joshua Osborne)
Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park
Lines: 40

> > I think if you go back and look at Appendix E of the Red (Purple?) book
> > you'll see why I decided to try to add some new Keysyms.  I strongly
> > believe that every key on the keyboard should have a unique identifier.
> > If we only use the Num_Lock key, then it becomes almost impossible to
> > differentiate between the keys unless you look at the Keycodes.   Then
> > you have an even more system specific case.  In the long run, new
> > Keysyms will provide a more consistent solution.

In article <9101101641.AA06324@iris49.biosym.com>, pete@iris49.UUCP (Pete Ware) writes:
> Doesn't Appendix E (on pg 643 in the 2nd edition) in the description
> of the common approach explicitely suggest  "folding likely aliases
> into the same keysym?"  The "common approach" philosiphy is not to
> have a unique Keysym associated with every engraving on a keyboard.
> 
> Perhaps the port to X can be viewed as an opportunity to clean up old
> hacks?  I guess I'm not being very sympathetic towards being backward
> compatible.

Well the hack that need to be cleaned is the keyboard, and it isn't going to
happen.

The ATish keyboards come in 2 basic flavors, one with a cursor pad, and one
with no cursor pad.  Under DOS both flavors' numeric keypad dubbles as a cursor
pad.  Without putting all the functionality of NumLock in the server (and loseing
the ability to treat the numeric pad as the application wishes).  There are two
ways to do that, assume that KP_8 is K_Up, KP_6 is K_Left, and so on, which can
be completly wrong on some numeric keypads (ones with 1 at the top left), or not
match the engravings for ScrollUp and ScrollDown (KP_9 & KP_3 I think), or the
entire pad.  The other fix is to add KeySyms for KP_Up and friends and put them
in the key maping table (I forget what it is called, the thing xmodmap plays
with...) in some standard way (in the Caps Position, or a new spot).

Both cause problems, which causes fewer?  Is there another soultion that causes
less then that?
-- 
           stripes@eng.umd.edu          "Security for Unix is like
      Josh_Osborne@Real_World,The          Multitasking for MS-DOS"
      "The dyslexic porgramer"                  - Kevin Lockwood
"Don't over-comment"     - p151 The Elements of Programming Style 2nd Edition
                                   Kernighan and Plauger