Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!convex!killer!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!iuvax!pur-ee!pur-phy!ng
From: ng@pur-phy (Nicholas J. Giordano)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: VANILLAKEYS and various other things
Keywords: function keys?
Message-ID: <1673@pur-phy>
Date: 23 Nov 88 14:48:24 GMT
References: <1732@scolex> <78687@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: ng@newton.physics.purdue.edu.UUCP (Nicholas J. Giordano)
Organization: Purdue Univ. Physics Dept., W. Lafayette, IN
Lines: 26

In article <78687@sun.uucp> cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) writes:
>Two problems that brian moffett is looking at and the solutions are
>pretty general. 
>
>1) VANILLAKEYS are just that, vanilla. No function keys, no help 
>keys. I believe they are poorly defined and should be redefined but
>that is up to jimm and company. 
>
>The workaround is to use RAWKEYS and DeadKeyConvert() whose source
>is around on Fish disks and various other places. Bryce Nesbitt
>wrote an article for AmigaMail that had this information in it. 

There is another way, which is not much work, but gets just about
all the keyboard information you USUALLY need.  It is to attach a console.device
to the window, and do all keyboard input/output through it.  This
gives you access to all the function keys, help keys, arrow keys,
etc., in an ANSI manner.  I think its easier to use than DeadKeyConvert(),
and the information that the console.device doesn't give (like when
a key is released) is often not needed anyway.

An example of this can be found in John Toebes (sp?) article in the
first (or second) Transactor issue, and in Matt Dillon's terminal
server for DNET.  They and others on the net put me on to this
approach, and its worked great for me.

Nick