Standard for configuring extra function keys

[Matthew Garrett]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 12:21:21PM +0100, Marvin Raaijmakers wrote:
> Please read: http://keytouch.sourceforge.net/desktopenv_cooperate.html
> More information about keytouch can be found at: http://keytouch.sf.net

You seem to be trying to solve two problems in one piece of code:

1) Mapping physical scancodes to Linux keycodes
2) Mapping Linux keycodes to session events

The first of these is certainly a cross-desktop issue, and I think the 
only sensible solution is to ensure that X keysyms are consistent 
everywhere. In the Linux case, the easiest way to ensure that is to 
make sure that, wherever possible, the physical scancodes are mapped to 
the logical keycodes as described in include/linux/input.h.

However, (2) would appear to be heavily desktop dependent. For instance, 
Gnome already has infrastructure to handle the volume being changed. 
Keytouch appears to tie it to aumix. There's infrastructure for starting 
the preferred web browser. Keytouch doesn't seem to use that.

I think Keytouch would be far better off sticking to (1), and leaving 
(2) up to the desktops. As long as they work at the X keysym level, no 
configuration is required.

As a suggestion - for laptops, you can use the DMI information to 
automatically detect which keymap you need. Check the hotkey-setup 
package in Debian or Ubuntu.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org