Mapping pointer events to keys and the other way around?

[Michal Suchanek]

On 28 March 2011 12:56, Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:
> On 28/03/11 20:09 , Michal Suchanek wrote:
>>
>> On 28 March 2011 07:20, Peter Hutterer<peter.hutterer at who-t.net>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 02:08:44PM +0100, Michal Suchanek wrote:
>>
>>>> There was some Wacom-specific support in their driver but that does
>>>> not work for plain mice and is probably non-functional in current
>>>> version of the driver anyway.
>>>>
>>>> Is there just documentation missing in xinput(1) and evdev(4) or is
>>>> there no such feature?
>>>
>>> no, it's a wacom-specific feature and quite painful to maintain anyway. I
>>> don't have any plans to add this to any other driver, it's too flimsy.
>>
>> The fact that this is a feature specific to the wacom driver and not
>> supported in the X server/xinput is most likely the reason why it is
>> so flimsy and painful to maintain. The driver developer has to compete
>> with X internals changes to keep this feature working.
>
> no, it's because it's simply a pain. once you start dealing with keys, you
> have to start dealing with keyboard layouts, at which point you have to deal
> with modifiers. it's quite trivial to make the driver spit out keycodes
> (after all, any keyboard does it), but people would rather configure it as
> "ctrl shift a", or whatever. and that again depends on the layout. I'm not
> saying it's impossible, it's merely annoying, a source of bugs and a
> questionable use case to begin with.

I don't see why there is a need to send keycodes rather than keysyms.

The keysyms are what the user wants, not the keycodes.

>
> Because in the end, what you're trying to do is to cope for missing UI
> features by adding a hack to the driver. Hardly any configuration I have
> seen so far wants the button do send "ctrl +". They want the button to zoom,
> but that's only possible by making it send "ctrl+". The right fix to the
> issue is to fix the applications so that button actions are configurable.

Configurable to the point that when I press mouse button 1 on "Lite-On
Technology USB Productivity Option Keyboard" the screen locks or when
I press mouse button 8 on the same device it produces the string "©
2011 Michal Suchanek"?

I don't think this is going to work yet both are quite valid use cases
for the additional buttons on the keyboard that produce mouse clicks
for some reason.

Thanks

Michal