SVU's blog

xkeyboard-config: last developments

I was not blogging here for a while. But the project is still live.

The major event for all of us is going to be GNOME 3 release. There was a lot of changes in the keyboard configuration GUI (now it is search-based, wow!). There was a mockup of what the Regional/Language configuration could look like – and GNOME is very close to it. In order to facilitate that change, some fixes in xk-c would have to be done. Most important, the layout/variant descriptions have to be changed.

In GNOME2, the full variant description was composed of the layout description (usually country name) and the variant description itself. For example, “USA – International”. That schema does not allow creating variants like “Engish (US)”.

Now, the descriptions for variants are full and self-contained. That allows putting there any lines, for example “English (US)”. That is a better approach – but it requires someone to take the latest base.xml.in, walk through it and fix the descriptions. to make them user-friendly If this is done before GNOME3 release – I’ll try to make extra (out of schedule) release of xkeyboard-config. Volunteers, anyone?

PS Last couple of days I got another set of traditional enjoyment, related to Crimean Tartar variant. Here and here. The guy does not get something important…

XKB Geometries

There is one interesting request in bugzilla: using notification service for displaying CapsLock/NumLock/ScrollLock state change, for those wireless keyboard that do not have LEDs.

How would you distinguish – what keyboard needs that feature enabled? I guess it would be logical to check XKB geometry… I know, better than anyone, about the sorry state of the geometries now – but it can be improved, right?

xkeyboard-config pre-1.7 freeze

The same way as 4 months ago, we’re in the freeze state.

Dear translators, please find some time to update your POs. Thanks!

Bug reporters, if you think your bug is worth fixing in 1.7, please remind me (you can do it here in comments). Unfortunately, these days the mail service of the xkb maillist is somewhat problematic, so I might have overlooked some updates…

handling exotic layouts in xkeyboard-config

twimc

To Zap or not to Zap

Some people are already aware that both Ubuntu and Fedora disable Ctrl-Alt-Bksp shortcut. There are hot discussions around that decision. Now, xkeyboard-config is a part of the battlefield. See this bug. At least, when that change is committed, users will be able to enable this shortcut back easily (for example, using gnome-keyboard-properties), by using proper XkbOption. But the default behavior would be as it is now in Ubuntu and Fedora – i.e. without that deadly feature.

PS Totally unrelated matter. If you’re Ukranian or Ukranian-speaking, you are very welcome to comment on that bug. Guys are asking to do the same thing as I did with Russian layout – make winkeys the default variant.

National-specific models: so long

Today I committed into xkeyboard-config one important change: removal of national specific models: jp106, kr106, abnt2. These models consisted of 2 parts: keycodes and geometries.

Keycodes, as I found, could be safely merged into the default xfree86 and evdev keycode sets. So I just did that.

About geometries… Since they are just “visibility”, functionally useless – there is no point to keep models just for geometries sake.

So, these models are gone (of course, layouts should be working as they always did!). The geometry definitions I will keep for some while, just in case – but I guess I’ll remove them soon too.

If any Brazilian/Japanese/Korean user feels offended – please raise your voice, explain your concerns. I appreciate any reasonable feedback.

PS On a side note, me and my better half got approval for Irish citizenship. After 8.5 years in the country, I am going to get the second passport and be able to travel the world easily!

Consolidation

The file systems/inet is of relatively low importance these days – now that everyone in linux world is using “evdev”. But still some people are using other OSes, some are using older X, so…

Anyway, yesterday I made a huge commit consolidating a lot of common mappings into nav_common section. As a part of that job some mappings were changed to make the behavior “univorm”. I32 is always mapped to XF86WWW, I02 is mapped to XF86HomePage (in some kbds they were swapped). XF86Refresh is replaced by XF86Reload everywhere (I could not find the real difference – and people used them randomly).

If you are using “kbd” driver with some media keyboard – I kindly ask you to check new version of the file from git and report all the breakages…

English

A question to all native speakers. What is the right way:

Alt+Shift change layout

or

Alt+Shift changes layout

Maemo-related misc

First, I would like to thank Nokia for ongoing efforts to develop the maemo platform. But what I do not quite understand is the silence regarding future software updates for maemo for n8x0. Will software “version 5” be available for us (officially or some kind of “hacker edition”)? Will it give us any benefits (all innovations listed so far are related to the new hardware)? May be, that info is already slipped somewhere – but I did not see it.Second, I just made first commit to xkeyboard-config from n810. Big thanks to the people who built git on maemo (well, GUI would be nice to have, but it is not critical). The missing piece in the “xkeyboard-config maintenance on n810” puzzle is the old “patch” utility – I could not find it, searching high and low. Funny enough…  If I do not find it, I’ll have to build it.

xkeyboard-config: now in git

This is now official. After release 1.3 xkeyboard-config is moved to git:

git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xkeyboard-config

ssh://git.freedesktop.org/git/xkeyboard-config

I am very new to the wonderful world of git, so it will take some time to get used to it.