xf86PostKeyEvent and xf86PostKeyboardEvent

[Andrew Zabolotny]

On Mon, 20 Mar 2006 02:06:44 -0500
"Zephaniah E. Hull" <warp at aehallh.com> wrote:

> These two functions (along with several others) are going to be
> reworked somewhat, most likely after 7.1 but hopefully before 7.2, at
> which point all of the input drivers will need at least some small
> changes, and in some cases some larger changes.
> 
> Tablet drivers that support multiple tools will require some much
> heavier changes, but the specifics have not been put into concrete
> yet.
Aha, that's great. Xinput certainly lacks a code review session.

By the way, are there any plans on doing something with input device
axis numbers? For now gtk just always supposes that axis 0 is x, axis 1
is y, axis 2 is pressure, axis 3 is xtilt, axis 4 is ytilt, axis 5 is
wheel.... this looks like a kind of hack. Some string 'role' associated
with every axis or something like this would work... For example, on the
'pad' tablet subdevice I don't have x/y/pressure/xtilt/ytilt but for
example I have a wheel... but I can't define axis 5 without axes 0-4,
so gtk applications are fooled into thinking that 'pad' has valid
x/y/pressure/tilt values.

> By the way, what's special about the wacom tablet in question that it
> requires a new driver?  What interface does it use and such?
Well, first it's a bluetooth tablet so I had to write the kernel driver
from scratch (all other wacom tablets are either serial or USB). And
second, like I said above, tablet buttons are unusable without using
special programs that translate extended button events into X11
events... I'm implementing this ability directly in the driver, e.g.
you may assign any x11 mouse/keyboard event to any tablet button
directly, and also you may choose whenever to generate a core event or
a 'extended input' event. The codebase for the driver is from the
wacom-linux project...

Why I'm concerned with buttons so much is that I've implemented in my
driver 17 'hot spots' along the edges of the active tablet area (but
outside of it) that work like buttons when you touch them with the
stylus/eraser. I discovered that tablet is sensible to one coordinate
along the edges of the active area, so I thought why not use it for
'pseudo-buttons' that would allow you to switch GIMP tools and do other
useful stuff...

-- 
Greetings,
   Andrew