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From: putnam@thuban.steinmetz (putnam)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: keyboard handling
Message-ID: <6609@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 2-Jul-87 09:19:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: steinmet.6609
Posted: Thu Jul  2 09:19:56 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Jul-87 07:36:07 EDT
Sender: root@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP
Reply-To: putnam@thuban.steinmetz.UUCP (putnam)
Distribution: world
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 39

Im more than a little bothered by the keyboard handling in NeWS.  The
keyboard handling that is already in it is ok for most vanilla stuff
and emulates terminal (ie vt100) keyboard handling acceptably (with
one exception) - but im not sure that is enough for major windowing
applications.

The first problem with keyboard handling is the lack of auto-repeat
on keys.  That is, if i hold down the "f" key, i expect to get
"fffffff" until i take it up with some reasonable time between the
"f"'s.  This does not happen and i have looked at the keyboard handling
code and dont see offhand just where to put it.  I thought it might be
nice to put it in the terminal handling at least for psterm - but that
would require even more hackery as there is no provision for handling
"up" events.  Not impossible, just painful.

A more fundamental problem seems to be the handling of
shift-control-meta type keys.  Currently the shift and control keys
are encoded when you get the event (so that "shift-a" becomes "A" and
so forth), the meta key is ignored here.  It is certainly possible to
get the values of the shift, control, meta keys - but is more work
(look for shift_keys_down, and so forth in dictionary UI_private).
But at this point the key has already been encoded for you and it may
be more difficult to get at what you want - that is if you really
want to deal with control-shift-meta-left-overshoe-x.  Again, its
not impossible to get this stuff - but i think the X model is simpler
and easier to deal with - though it does require more work on the part
of the client to handle.

I imagine that one of the reasons for doing things this way is to 
help to unify the user interface - so that most user interfaces look
similar - and this is a laudable goal - but is this the right level
at which to do it?

Any thoughts?


Well, shall we go?  -- jefu (jeff putnam)
Yes, lets go.       -- UUCP: steinmetz!putnam
(They do not move.) -- ARPA: putnam@ge-crd.com