Re: Issues with keyboard accelerators

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Hi Simos,

Yesterday at 13:07, Simos wrote:

> GTK+ could be modified so that when it sees "_árbol", it would
> actually register it as if it work "_arbol", so pressing Alt+a would
> simply work.
> The downside is that it would not be able to distinguish between áäãâà, etc.
> Would that be a realistic problem however?

Yes. With eg. Serbian Latin keyboard layout (and translation), š and s
are totally different letters, as are č, ć and c (with distinct
positions on the keyboard).

> Would we want users to have to press Alt+<dead_acute>+a in order to
> get to the accelerator? With some layouts, you get <dead_acute> when
> you press AltGr+<somekey>, so the full keyboard sequence is
> Alt+(AltGr+<somekey>+<a>).
>
> I think I have seen a report about this but I cannot find it at gtk+,
> component: input-methods. It might actually be a report at
> freedesktop.org, so you might want to have a look there. The sequence
> Alt+<dead_key>+<char> might actually fail due to the X server cutting
> the sequence once the deadkey is pressed.

One can always modify a keymap to treat a dead key as another modifier
that uses a new level (with XKB, you can have up to 64 levels, if I am
not mistaken and/or confusing it with groups which you can have up to
8).

We've tried doing something similar for Ctrl key for Serbian before,
but that conflicted Gtk+'s special handling of Ctrl key.  With dead
keys, you should not have that many problems, but you might need to
provide a new level for each of the dead keys.

Cheers,
Danilo