Re: Ang. Re: Proposal: mouse-only Caribou for GNOME 2.30

[Ben Konrath <ben konrath utoronto ca>]

Hi Steve and David,

On 12/11/2009 08:35 AM, Steve Lee wrote:
> 2009/12/11 David Colven <Colven ace-centre org uk>:
>> Sorry if I’m being dum – I am down with flu at the moment – but I don’t see
>> why a joystick switch inout should not do exactly what the daisy reader
>> wants.  Window will not react to input from a USB fire button unless it’s
>> told to, will ot?
> 
> Yes that is exactly correct. AFAIK the foot switch was a USB HID - ie
> same as joystick. So the point was that sometimes having events
> ignored by the OS can be useful.

USB HID is a general class for USB devices which includes keyboards,
mice and joysticks (amongst other things):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_human_interface_device_class

So just because something is a USB HID, does not mean that the events
are ignored by default by the OS. For example, events from switch
interfaces that emulate mice are not ignored by default on modern Linux
systems. Xinput2 will help this problem by allowing us to put these
switch devices into a 'floating slave' mode which will allow apps to
register for events from the specific device. When a device is in this
mode, events are not sent to any of the pointers - yes, there can be
more than one pointer with xinput2!

I hope this clears things up a bit :-).

Cheers, Ben