Re: keyboard indicator

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-10-07 at 01:24 +0100, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> Hi folks
> 
> I just run gnome-shell for the first time. Impressive. But there is
> one featurelet that is missing - the keyboard layout indicator. For
> the good old panel, it is an applet. What would be the right way to
> integrate the indicator into g-s?
> 
> Logically it belongs to the status menu, should appear if number of
> layouts is > 1. There is a gtk widget in libgnomekbd, so it could be
> put into the menu. That would be another (optional) dependency.
> 
> Am I missing something?

To me, it is very similar to the stuff that's already in the system icon
tray:

 - Power
 - Network
 - Volume

The design is that the system icon tray is mostly that type of stuff
related to your hardware; messaging (pidgin, xchat, gwibber) is handled
by the message tray.

So the easiest thing would be to just have it as a notification icon.
For a notification icon, you'll need to export from some process - maybe
a gnome-settings-daemon module?

The other approach would be to reimplement it as part of GNOME Shell.
Keyboard status is a pretty basic thing that needs to be there and needs
to work really well: if you have multiple layouts, then you should
always get a status notifier and it should be the best possible status
notifier and have the best possible integration with the rest of the UI.

So, we'd take a patch that just added keyboard status indication to the
Shell Clutter UI. But if you want to reuse some widget you have, that's
probably easier to do with a notification area applet.

- Owen