Input Methods

[Jan Arne Petersen]

Hi,

On 07/10/2012 03:49 PM, Philipp Brüschweiler wrote:
> Thanks for your answer. I have finally managed to get something going,
> using a wl_keyboard_grab. This seems to work, but has the problem that
> it completely grabs the text_model until the text_model gets
> deactivated.

Yes, that is why the text_model needs to be deactivated when the surface 
looses focus (see my other email).

> I have looked at wl_keyboard_set_focus a bit, and it
> seems to me that for further work, the input method system would have
> to be integrated into wayland so as to make sure that the focused
> surface doesn't loose focus but the key events still get redirected to
> the input method.

I do not really understand in which case the surface should not loose focus?

Regards,
Jan Arne

>
> On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Jan Arne Petersen
> <jpetersen at openismus.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> On 07/09/2012 06:32 PM, Philipp wrote:
>>>
>>> I have been thinking about trying to implement a simple composing
>>> input method (like for example pinyin). I read
>>> http://blog.jpetersen.org/2012/06/20/text-input-method-support-in-wayland/
>>> and https://wiki.maliit.org/Wayland_Input_Method_System_Proposal but I
>>> didn't manage to understand how composing input methods are supposed
>>> to work, specifically there is no mention about how keyboard input is
>>> going to be handled. I'm not sure if I overlooked something, or if
>>> this part is not specified yet.
>>
>>
>> The handling of keyboard input is not described in the above linked proposal
>> yet. I would like to fix that issue in future iterations of my input method
>> for Wayland work.
>>
>>
>>> I thought about the problem a bit and in my opinion the cleanest
>>> solution would be the following: An input method can request direct
>>> keyboard input; if it does so, then the keyboard input that would flow
>>> to the application in focus is instead redirected to the input method,
>>> otherwise the keyboard input is sent to the application as normal.
>>> Does this sound reasonable?
>>
>>
>> Yes, that is also my idea. Having requests in the input_method interface to
>> get key events from the compositor to the input method.
>>
>>
>>> Now I'm trying to hack in redirection of keyboard input to the active
>>> input method iff there is an input method that requested keyboard
>>> input and there is an active text model. I think I identified the
>>> points where I would have to do that (e.g. in text_model_activate
>>> etc.).
>>
>>
>> An active text_model would be assigned to a wl_seat (which is a keyboard
>> focus). One needs to take the keyboard focus and surface assigned to the
>> text_model into account to deactivate the text_model when the surface looses
>> focus, for example when the surface is unmapped. See wl_keyboard_set_focus
>> calls where focus could get lost.
>>
>>
>>> My question is: how do redirect the keyboard input? I'm a bit
>>> lost in a huge tangle of pointers and messages and requests, it would
>>> be great if I could get a pointer or two (hur hur) to get started in
>>> the right direction.
>>
>>
>> The easiest would be to assign a wl_keyboard_grab to the wl_keyboard
>> belonging to that wl_seat, than one gets the key events and modifiers.
>> Additionally one would be interested in the keymap.
>>
>> Regards
>> Jan Arne Petersen
>> _______________________________________________
>> wayland-devel mailing list
>> wayland-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
>> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel
> _______________________________________________
> wayland-devel mailing list
> wayland-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel
>