Re: Loadable keyboards

[Jo Even Skarstein <joska@nuts.edu>]

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.

> map Polish or whatever characters on any keys and would not need Alt
> combinations anymore.

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.


/*
** Jo Even Skarstein    http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~josk/
**
**    beer - maria mckee - atari falcon - babylon 5
*/