[Spice-devel] why getScanCode() will not work for keyboard input

[i iordanov]

Hi Marc-Andre,

(And anybody else who wants to weigh in on this). After some research,
reading and experimentation, here is what I've discovered.

getScanCode() works only for physical devices (e.g. USB keyboards,
bluetooth keyboards, or hardware device keyboards). The vast majority of
input devices on Android are soft-keyboards which generate KeyEvents with
invalid or missing scan codes.

Such KeyEvents also don't even have a keycode. In such events, Android sets
the keycode to KEYCODE_UNKNOWN. In addition, a KeyEvent is quite often a
sequence of unicode characters rather than a single unicode character.

What *can* be obtained from every KeyEvent, however, is one or more unicode
characters with the getUnicodeChar() and getCharacters() functions
respectively.. For VNC purposes, what I do in bVNC is to convert these
unicode characters to X11 keysym values, which are then passed to the VNC
server. These keysyms are not just the ones that correspond to the XT
keyboard keys, but a much larger set which maps pretty much every unicode
character to a keysym.

Do you guys see any way in which we can handle this situation where the
input is not as straight forward as an XT keyboard?

What would work is if mobile clients were able to either send unicode
characters or X11 keysyms to the server.

Does anybody else have any better ideas?

Thanks again!
iordan


-- 
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