Re: Loadable keyboards

[q-funk@megacom.net (Martin-Eric Racine)]

 >On Sat, 20 Jun 1998, Petr Stehlik wrote:
 >
 >> But I think the Alt keys are not needed at all. Do they exist on
 >> English/American keyboards? I think they're on German and similar
 >> keyboards where they needed to put some special national chars on
 >> keyboards and they were missing free keys. I think the real solution is
 >> to use dead keys or two different keyboards (one for programmers with
 >
 >I totally disagree with you on this one. Here in Norway the ALT-key is
 >used like the AltGr-key on PC's, converting to dead-keys would be very
 >inconvenient. I suggest to go the other way, extend bios/gemdos to
 >handle keytables for alt/shift+alt/caps+alt as well. This should be
 >quite easy to do in Clocky as well.

The problem is, the KBD table format only knows about:

   Normal, Shifted, Caps.
   
It doesn't know about Control or Alternate key combinations.


The MultiTOS keytable is a bit better, it also knows about Alternate.

Then, there's the CKBD table format, which is text-based and even more
flexible, as it assumes Alt is gonna be used to request an accent; it
follows the Dec/VT convention of Alt, followed by letter, then accent.
For instance:

;(IOS-8859-1 table)

 { "A^",194 }   ;  A circumflex
 { "A~",195 }   ;  A tilde
 { 'A"',196 }   ;  A umlaut
 { "A*",197 }   ;  A ring
 { "A.",197 }   ;  A ring, TOS
 { "AE",198,ORDER }  ; AE ligature
 { "C,",199 }   ;  C cedilla
 { "E`",200 }   ;  E grave
 { "E'",201 }   ;  E acute
 { "E^",202 }   ;  E circumflex

As you can see, the CKB format also is a text-based file, listing
letter and accent combination, plus resulting ASCII character number.
This makes it MUCH easier to remap keyboards, contrary to the KBD
format, where you always have to guess that greek Theta will result
in "e circumflex" because it's ascii 233.

 >As I said, Alt-keys are heavily used here in Norway, and I know that
 >the Swedes and Germans does it like this as well. Dead-keys are fine
 >for odd and rarely-used characters, but having []{}@~| on dead-keys or
 >a separate keymap would be *very* inconvenient.

Yes, in fact, english/US keyboards are the only ones not using Alt-key
combinations; french keyboards also use them, afaik.

Personally, I prefer the DEC/VT method mentioned above. It keeps all
keys accessible at all times (instead of locking them dead), and is
simple enough to use, even on this US keyboard.  When I code or mail
Atari stuff (80% of the time), I can access every keys very quickly,
but when I do private mail in french or finnish (the remaining 20%),
I use Alt-key combinations.  

Deadkeys disrupt normal keyboard operation and should be avoided at 
all costs, IMHO.


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