Thursday 1 March 2007

Keybindings, they're back! and they're hungry for blood!

Everybody remembers (or should remember) the "Unf*ck my keyboard" session at the 2006 Boston Summit.

Thanks to Jens Granseuer, the old multimedia keys that needed keybindings assigned to them now work just as they should with players such as Totem, and Rhythmbox, using D-Bus to pass along the keypresses. A 3-year old bug goes dead.

Today, I just finished another part of the fun, which was making it possible for 3rd-party applications to add shortcuts to the Keybindings c(r)applet. I hope the patch will make it early in 2.19.x so that applications like Beagle and Tomboy can use it, instead of adding this sort of thing in their own preferences dialogue.

Last part of the problem is being able to update keymaps in a reasonably user-friendly way. Metacity, and all the other apps using GTK+ to translate the "keybinding" string to something Gdk understands, don't know how to handle keys without keysyms. When such a key is pressed in the keybindings applet, we should allow the user to map the key to a keysym, name their keyboard map, and send it off to us (or keep it for themselves, it's supposed to be dead-easy anyway).

That's a much harder problem though. For later, yes, later.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice work on the shortcut thing. Now if only LIRC support was as well integrated...

Anonymous said...

I would really like to get profiles for my keyboards into the gnome keyboard layout chooser.
Obviously at the moment there is no easy way to do this, but I'm prepared to note all the scancodes and key names to make it happen.

The problem is that I just don't know how! I'm sure if there's a document somewhere and it is publicised, plenty of others like myself would be willing to ramp up the out-of-the-box support for their keyboards too.

So.... anyone got a URL or some hints? :)