nanogui: X11 compatibility and pseudo-keyboards.
Subject:
X11 compatibility and pseudo-keyboards.
From:
Gaillard Pierre-Olivier ####@####.####
Date:
6 Dec 1999 19:52:08 -0000
Message-Id: <38444126.8991C142@free.fr>
Hello,
My two main concerns regarding nano-X at the moment are :
1) differences from X11, I would like Xcopilot to run on it.
2) having keyboard replacements (if possible in a modular way).
I have done some investigations about both.
1) About X11. I have started with writing a small C program that
converts basic Xlib calls to nano-X calls. The calls I have chosen are
those used in Xcopilot 0.6.2 (0.6.7-tr uses X toolkit which makes
implementation even tougher...).
I was disappointed to see that event codes and event masks were
incompatible with their X counterparts (e.g.FOCUS_IN and FOCUS_OUT
instead of Focus Change).
But nano-X is cleaner since events and event masks can be deduced from
each other simply whereas this is more difficult in X (the order changes
!).
Also, I am a bit worried about image functions implementation, I hope
nano-X will soon have XCreateImage and XPutImage like functions.
2) I have looked up for keyboard replacements :
- jstroke, kanjipad are 'C' programs recognizing japanese characters
that you draw. The second is a gnome version of the first where the
recognition engine is encapsulated. Both have their roots in the
Goldberg unistroke paper. But I have trouble figuring how to set the
character-set back to roman characters.
- ustroke.tgz and tcube.tgz that I found on some freebsd japanese
site but I cannot find the URL again. There are readme files that I
cannot read (my japanese is poor). They are integrated with X and use
XInput. But to give scancodes to the Xserver they write it to the
console directly (using an ioctl code not available in Linux).
My opinion about this input situation is that :
- these programs can be used to replace grafitti. But we need to be
careful to select one that we can extend.
- we could do with something more abstract that writing directly to the
console. I would like it if a dedicated keyboard daemon wrote to the
console and accepted keystrokes from a socket. It would make it easy to
write pseudo-keyboards (e.g. a program on my PC could get what I type
and copy it to the Palm-PC's keyboard daemon over PPP).
I would be interested to know what you think about these issues.
P.O. Gaillard
