Re: [Utopia] Acme tool

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Hey Martin,

On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 13:47 +0100, Martin Owens wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I notice that in Gnome 2.2 there is a new tool for hot keys called
> Acme and see from the cvs logs that your one of the developers behind
> it.
> 
> I wanted to ask you what the plans where for the tool, because I'm a
> programmer and I was going to make a similar tool but no point in
> duplicate work.
> 
> I was going to include the ability to have profiles and have then
> stored online with little images for the most popular (this gives a
> little bit of assurance that they profile is the correct one) and
> selecting the right profile or even making a new one for keyboards
> which are unknown could be made easyer.
> 
> there is also the posibility I was thinking of auto detecting some usb
> keyboards and starting up the correct profile where we know for sure
> what the keyboard is.

ACME is now officially dead, as the functionality has been integrated in
the GNOME control-center, in the keyboard shortcuts section.

Even better, we can now use more than single keys to bind to actions,
ie. we can use key combinations as opposed to single keys.

Sergey is the maintainer for libxkb and the layout setup part of the
GNOME control-center. I am sure he would be interested in getting some
auto-detection working in the setup tools, to reduce the amount of work
one has to do to set everything up properly.

I would recommend:
- detecting which layout is the best for each keyboard (a new property
in HAL?)
- have the GNOME bits automatically setup the right layout
- (very hard, I guess), having a tool to help setup the extra keys, for
inclusion into the keyboard data package.

Comments?

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> 
People say to me you're typecast, and frankly I am typecast. But I
always looked at that as, at least I'm being cast.     -- Rob Schneider