[PATCH weston v2 1/3] toytoolkit: Allow operation without a keymap

[Daniel Stone]

On 22 June 2013 03:55, Bill Spitzak <spitzak at gmail.com> wrote:
> Daniel Stone wrote:
>> If you can think of a way to simplify this, please send concrete
>> patches to GTK+, Qt and co., and when they've changed, we can later
>> simplify xkbcommon.  But unfortunately in the last however many years,
>> no-one's managed to come up with a better solution which actually
>> works for all the real-world usecases, without the full keymap.
>
> There would be a keysym that means "there is a 'W' printed on this key", and
> a keysym (or several) that means "this is a Shift key" and "this is a Ctrl
> key", and the client would wait for them all to be down.
>
> Yes this would not work if there was no key with a 'W' printed on it on the
> keyboard. However in real software that is not how it works. Shortcuts are
> written as "Alt+Shift+4", not "Alt+$", they are based on physical keys, not
> on the symbols they can produce.
>
> If software really wants to say "hold down Alt and type a 'W'" then it has
> to talk to the input method, since that is the only thing that knows how to
> make a 'W' (imagine an input method that produces 'w' when you type 'u'
> twice, perhaps in a compose sequence).

That's not really how shortcut processing actually works today, and
don't think your suggestion would work in practice.  But again, if you
want to try it out, go patch GTK+ to behave as you've just described
and see if it actually works.