DBus server for keyboard layouts

[David Weinehall]

On fre, 2007-10-05 at 12:41 +0100, ext Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> > If moving the cursor into the German text would suddenly swap the
> > keyboard layout to qwertz, I'd be *very* *very* *very* upset.
> 1. It would not do it if you do not have German layout in your current
> configuration - it can only switch to one of the configured layouts

Having multiple layouts configured isn't the problem.  Having them
dynamically change around is.  I don't mind using qwertz (or rather, I
don't mind that much), but I want it to be predictable.

> (we do not provide interface to change the whole configuration)
> 2. I really hope the app would make that behaviour optional.


> > People who write multi-lingual documents that necessitate a keyboard
> > layout that differs from the one they normally use are a minority.
> I would not be so sure. You are talking about people who write
> documents with the same script (Latin alphabet). But once you start
> writing multi-alphabet documents (English, Russian) - that feature is
> really handy.

So, imagine this:

"The french word for colour is colour."  So the second instance of
colour in that sentence is tagged as French, thus the layout changes.
But there's no visual indication of it being in a different language.

In the cases where you have two very distinct scripts you can of course
easily predict a layout change, but no such luck for similar languages.

I find it hard to conceive of a use case where you'd change layout
actively when writing a text (since writing the text itself takes
several magnitudes longer than pressing a function key to swap layout).
I can possibly see the benefit of having automagic changes when doing
corrections, since typo fixes etc are usually single letter changes, but
even then the difference between 1 key presses and 2 key presses is
pretty low.  And if you're correcting things, it's probably easier to
correct one language at a time anyway, so you can set the layout
beforehand.

> I agree that making that feature default behaviour could be too much,
> but having it available for people who need it would be a really nice
> touch. Exactly as you said "allowing the special case where feasible".

But the special case is already possible.  Change it manually.  Also,
I'm pretty sure that this behaviour is possible to implement on the
widget level if necessary.


Regards: David