Re: mc Digest, Vol 120, Issue 7

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

Chris, I don't completely understand. Please see my comments in-line, 
below.

On Sat, 31 May 2014, chris glur wrote:

> Re. hardware with unfamiliar keybrd:
> the hardware must adjust to YOU. 

First, are you familiar with the Samsung Chromebook keyboard? There are 
missing keys. Keys which most of us use quite often. And those keys are 
not switched around. They are simply not there. So, exactly what I am 
trying to do is to make the hardware adjust to me.


If we've been accustomed to 'asdf' for decades,
> we shouldn't need to re-adjust to 'afds'.  

Unfortunately, it is worse than that. Just supposeing that you were 
confronted with  keyboard which had something like 'a(missing key)(another 
missing key) f' then exactly what would you do about that? And by "missing 
key" what I precisely mean is that there is a blank area on the keyboard 
where those two keys are supposed to be, between the 'a' and the 'f' keys. 
Suppose further that the machine otherwise had a nice CPU and a cheap 
price and intersting hardware features.

Well, the situation is not that bad, actually. All the alphanumeric keys 
are present. But, to reiterate,

1. there is no Delete key, so just for starters there is no 
Cntrl-Alt-Delete for rebooting. 

2. The PageUp and PageDown and Home and 
End keys are not physically present, either. 

3. no Insert key. 

4. no keypad, and no substitute for it by use of, for example, a 'Fn' key 
which re-maps some of the alphanumeric keys to other meanings when it is 
used in combination with them. 

Over a period of decades, many laptops of various 
brands have resorted to the use of the 'Fn" key in order to double up on 
the meanings of some of the keys, most particularly in order to remap 
some other keys to the keypad keys. I am almost certain that you have seen 
sometime during your life a laptop which has such a key on it and perhaps 
have even used it. But the Samsung 303 Chromebook does not have any such 
key. And you can't use some other key for that. The Wikipedia article on 
the 'Fn' key might help to explain why not.


> If chromebook breaks
> PC-keybrd conventions,
> this will be worked on by many other users [besides mc], who will do
> the research for you.

Funny, that is what I happen to be working on at the moment. And I have 
had some success, though I could try something else in the future. And you 
are trying to tell me to sit and wait until someone else does it?

I think it would be far more helpful to me if you, or someone, could give 
me a brief overview of how that MC recogizes the keys you pressed. 

Specifically, it appears that MC does not consult or use the console 
keymap files and the lists of key codes which they give, and the 
functionality which is associated in those files with the respective 
keycodes. As evidence for this statement, I can say that changing those 
key mappings in certain ways leads to results which are visible in the 
console and on the command line, provided that one is not running MC in 
the foreground. But if one opens MC, then some of those re-mappings 
which I created are inoperative inside of MC or the MC editor.

If I am wrong in what I say just above, it would be very nice to have an 
explanation of what is wrong about it. But if I am right or even if I am 
wrong then it would be even nicer to have an explanation of what is really 
happening instead.

I did not ask you or anyone else to go and get busy right now and do a 
bunch of work and drastically re-code everything related to the keyboard. 
What I wanted was some information about how the keyboard access works in 
MC as of now. It could be that there has been some misunderstanding on 
your part.

Theodore Kilgore


> _______________________________________________
> mc mailing list
> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc