On Sun, Apr 16, 2000 at 02:04:24PM +0200, Rick van Rein wrote:
> I released a keyboard patch for `hot keys' and wish to bring up a discussion
> topic around it. I made the following observation:
>
> Funny/Functional Keys such as `play' and `mute' should not be
> treated as normal keys. Rather than delivering a string to be
> interpreted by listening applications, it is better to invoke
> an action when the keys are pressed.
>
> I am curious if y'all agree to this.
I do not think there is any reason to treat these funny keys differently from
our present Function keys.
Your /dev/funkey sounds nice, I wouldnt complain if your patch were applied.
What do you obtain? The possibility to use loadkeys or the underlying
ioctl to redirect certain keystrokes to a different destination.
This would make all those people that yearn for DOS hotkeys and TSRs happy.
But it is only a single destination, so you need a daemon that reads
/dev/funkey and opens sockets so that everybody who wants to register
their interest in a few keys can communicate via a socket with the daemon.
I wonder how much such constructions would be used in practice.
Maybe if we introduce this we conclude soon afterwards that it does
not have the right level of generality.
[There have been somewhat similar attempts before.
For example, there is the dynamic console stuff.
This never became a big success because people manage just as well without.
It is not so bad if one needs two or three keystrokes instead of one to
change the speaker volume. As far as I know nothing happened with the
dynamic_vc package the last five years.]
SysRq is something entirely different. It is a strange kludge meant
to work in an emergency situation, when user space is dead and
the kernel is half-dead. It cannot depend on a daemon.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 23 2000 - 21:00:09 EST