benjamin m. schwartz wrote: > On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, Walter Bender wrote: > > > On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Tiago Marques <tiago...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I was just looking at the layout again and just noticed the new arrow keys > >> placement. > > > We debated this one. A shorter shift key would be difficult to type > > on. We opted to emulate the hjkl vi arrangement. > > Keyboard layout is virtually the ultimate bikeshed painting problem > ... but here's my opinion anyway. > > Ins and Del are Harmful. You probably know Ins because when you > accidentally bump it, your editor switches into "overwrite" mode, and > every character you type deletes another until you figure out what > happened and hit Ins again. "Del" is the reverse erase that nobody > wants. Apple, and the XO-1, have eliminated Ins and relegated Del to > Fn+Erase. I recommend removing both.
part of the impetus for this keyboard is that it be more "normal", for use by older students, perhaps in non-sugar environments. so i think that's why some of the legacy keys have come back. (but i agree -- i occasionally use Del in a web editing form to delete forward, but could easily live without it or Insert.) > > Getting rid of those keys frees up valuable space that can be used, > for example to move += to the top row, replaced by ?, replaced by > up-arrow. No more hjkl. i'd far rather have as much of the punctuation in their correct places as possible. i even tried to get walter to shorten the enter key, to make room for the '" between ;: and enter. he didn't go for it. :-) > > Some other notes: > > 1. fn is a bad key because software can't reuse it. For example, on > the XO-1 we tried to make fn+F1 send an F1 press to the activity > (instead of going to the mesh view), but it was not possible because > the fn key is treated specially by the keyboard microcontroller, and > not forwarded to the OS. There was no way to tell from software > whether a user had pressed fn+F1 or just F1. if you watch /dev/input/eventN, where N is the right device for the keyboard, you'll get a KEY_FN code for the Fn key. and if you use it to modify F1, you'll get KEY_FN_F1 instead of KEY_F1. i'm checking this on 2.6.31 on XO-1.5. it's possible that 2.6.25 on XO-1 was different. paul > > Accordingly, on new keyboards, OLPC should consider pushing this > special handling into the software keyboard mapping as much as > possible. It's hard to see why fn+Spacebar needs to be a new keycode, > and not just a series of standard up/down events. The only tricky > spot I can think of is PageUp/PageDown/Home/End. > > 2. We have a lot of redundant modifier keys. fn, altgr, and hand-key > could all be a single key, because they are never used together. If > the keyboard controller would turn altgr+left into Home (etc.), there > should be no regression of functionality, even under windows. > > --Ben > > _______________________________________________ > Devel mailing list > Devel@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel =--------------------- paul fox, p...@laptop.org _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel