Re: 3.6 Feature: IBus/XKB integration

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org>]

On Wed, 2012-04-25 at 15:31 +0100, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:

> no way to find the audience that would be unbiased? Are you just
> implying that the current userbase of GNOME is so geekish that fair
> survey among existing users would only represent the POV of geeks?

It would be very instructive to see how non-geek people configure their
keyboards (if they do at all!), and how they manage to survive on an
everyday basis.

However, even the geeky survey is useful to know what multilingual,
touch-typey, have-to-write-a-lot people need in order to make things
bearable.

Some anecdotal data points:

- In Mexico, (Windows) computers get shipped with a Latin American
keyboard configuration.  Most of the time, what you see on keys is what
gets put on the screen - but not always.

- People never know how to type "@".  Mostly everyone learns that
AltGr-Q will do the trick, but if it's not that, they'll resort to
cutting and pasting that single symbol from elsewhere.

- No one has any idea that a "character map" program exists.  When you
show it to them, they understandably react like you opened a treasure
chest and gave it to them.

- My wife has learned the position of the third-level chooser key on her
Mac laptop, and also the Compose key there.  She has tons of trouble
every time she has to use *my* laptop, as it uses AltGr, which is not on
the same position as the Mac's key.  I have tons of trouble when using
*her* laptop, as I can never remember if that key is the one to the left
of the cloverleaf key or two apart (AFAICT this key doesn't have a label
that indicates "this is the key you use to type characters not present
in the keyboard labels").  (If my wife has to use my laptop and it
happens to be in the English keyboard layout (which I use for
programming), she has to ask me to change the layout to Latin American,
which is the one she knows.)

I *think* touch typists and hunt-and-peck typists suffer in equal
amounts with keyboard layouts, just in different ways :)

  Federico