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> Ideally, a computer keyboard would be able to directly send both an arbitrary number of named control functions, and arbitrary unicode text (either as full st

> Ideally, a computer keyboard would be able to directly send both an arbitrary number of named control functions, and arbitrary unicode text (either as full strings or as code units one by one) You're right about how the input stack is tangled up, but wrong about the ideal state. The keyboard is absolutely not the right place for this sort of intelligence. No keyboard has 100k+ keys, so Unicode input is fundamentally a UI problem. Look at the enormous number of Chinese input methods, all of which need to cooperate closely with the GUI to work. Or heck, how do you type é? On OS X, you can either press option-e followed by e, or press and hold e, and select from a popup menu. These both require integration with the OS and GUI, and cannot be handled by the keyboard itself. Even setting aside Unicode input, we still often need to know which keys were pressed. I'm programming a FPS game - what happens when the user presses the 2 key? If it's on the number row, it should select weapon #2; but if it's on the numpad, it should move the character backwards. So it's not enough to know the key's character; I need to know which physical key was pressed! The layered approach you describe is confusing and error-prone, but it's necessary, because software needs to act at different levels. Some software wants very high-level Unicode text input, while others need to know very fine-grained keyboard layout details. All of the data must be bubbled up through all layers.

jacobolus 12y ago
I said this was my ideal, not that it was a practical way forward for our current software stack. In my ideal world, your app registers that it needs a “pick weapon #2” button, and a “walk backward” button. Then I can configure my keyboard firmware and/or the low levels of my operating system keyboard handling code to map whatever button I want to those semantic actions. The problem with the scheme where the application is programmed to directly look for the “2” key and then pick which semantic meaning to assign based on context, is that there is at that point no way to intercept and disambiguate “put a 2 character in the text box” from “pick weapon #2”. This isn’t the biggest problem for games, but it’s a huge pain in the ass when, for example, all kinds of desktop applications intercept my standard text-editing shortcuts (either system defaults or ones I have defined myself) and clobbers them with its own new commands (for example many applications overwrite command+arrows or option+arrows or similar to mean “switch tab”, but in a text box context I am instead trying to say “move to the beginning of the line” or “move left by one word”), often leaving me no way to separate the semantic intentions into separate keystrokes. The problem is that there is no level at which I can direct a particular button on my keyboard to always mean “move left by one word”... the way things are set up now, I have literally no way to firmly bind a key to that precise semantic meaning, but instead I need to bind the key to some ambiguous keystroke which only sometimes has that meaning, but sometimes might mean something else instead.
- klodolph 12y ago
  > In my ideal world, your app registers that it needs a “pick weapon #2” button, and a “walk backward” button. Then I can configure my keyboard firmware and/or the low levels of my operating system keyboard handling code to map whatever button I want to those semantic actions. Then the OS / Firmware is dealing with questions like, "What button fires the secondary dorsal thrusters". Does it make sense to handle that kind of question so far from the site where the semantic knowledge is present? No. Likewise, a web server doesn't provide application-level semantic information in its replies, only protocol-level semantic information. One application might think 301 means "update the bookmark" and 502 means "try again later", but another application might think 502 means "try another server" or that 404 might mean "delete a local file" or "display an error message to the user". Likewise, a game is prepared to deal with buttons, not semantics. The number and layout of buttons is closely tied with design decisions. A FPS gives you WASD, plus QERF for common actions, ZXC for less common actions, 1234 for menus / weapon selections. The design of the game from top to bottom is affected by this. You swap in a controller for a keyboard, and you'll decide to change how weapon selection is presented: maybe spokes around a center so you can use a joystick instead of items in a row corresponding to numeric buttons. You add auto-aim to compensate for the inaccuracy inherent in gamepad joysticks, but the vehicle sections become easier. You might even redesign minigames (Mass Effect has a completely different hacking minigame for console and PC versions). Or look at web browsers. As soon as you hook a touch interface to the web browser you might want to pop up an on-screen keyboard in response to touch events, but you need to move the viewpoint so that you can see what you're typing. Input is inherently messy, and you can't pull semantics out of applications because you'll just make the user experience worse. ON THE OTHER HAND... > The problem is that there is no level at which I can direct a particular button on my keyboard to always mean “move left by one word”... This is available through use of common UI toolkits. I believe on OS X, you can bind a button to mean "move left by one word" in all applications which use the Cocoa toolkit (which is the vast majority of all applications on OS X). The way this works is there are some global preferences which specifies a key binding for "moveWordLeft:". The key event, when it is not handled by other handlers, then gets translated to a "moveWordLeft:" method call by NSResponder. The method for configuring these key bindings is relatively obscure, suffice it to say that you can press option+left arrow in almost any application to move left one word, and you can configure the key binding (i.e., choose a different key) across applications on a per-user basis. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSResponder_Class/index.html#//apple_ref/occ/instm/NSResponder/moveWordLeft https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...:

jacobolus 12y ago

I said this was my ideal, not that it was a practical way forward for our current software stack. In my ideal world, your app registers that it needs a “pick weapon #2” button, and a “walk backward” button. Then I can configure my keyboard firmware and/or the low levels of my operating system keyboard handling code to map whatever button I want to those semantic actions. The problem with the scheme where the application is programmed to directly look for the “2” key and then pick which semantic meaning to assign based on context, is that there is at that point no way to intercept and disambiguate “put a 2 character in the text box” from “pick weapon #2”. This isn’t the biggest problem for games, but it’s a huge pain in the ass when, for example, all kinds of desktop applications intercept my standard text-editing shortcuts (either system defaults or ones I have defined myself) and clobbers them with its own new commands (for example many applications overwrite command+arrows or option+arrows or similar to mean “switch tab”, but in a text box context I am instead trying to say “move to the beginning of the line” or “move left by one word”), often leaving me no way to separate the semantic intentions into separate keystrokes. The problem is that there is no level at which I can direct a particular button on my keyboard to always mean “move left by one word”... the way things are set up now, I have literally no way to firmly bind a key to that precise semantic meaning, but instead I need to bind the key to some ambiguous keystroke which only sometimes has that meaning, but sometimes might mean something else instead.

klodolph 12y ago
> In my ideal world, your app registers that it needs a “pick weapon #2” button, and a “walk backward” button. Then I can configure my keyboard firmware and/or the low levels of my operating system keyboard handling code to map whatever button I want to those semantic actions. Then the OS / Firmware is dealing with questions like, "What button fires the secondary dorsal thrusters". Does it make sense to handle that kind of question so far from the site where the semantic knowledge is present? No. Likewise, a web server doesn't provide application-level semantic information in its replies, only protocol-level semantic information. One application might think 301 means "update the bookmark" and 502 means "try again later", but another application might think 502 means "try another server" or that 404 might mean "delete a local file" or "display an error message to the user". Likewise, a game is prepared to deal with buttons, not semantics. The number and layout of buttons is closely tied with design decisions. A FPS gives you WASD, plus QERF for common actions, ZXC for less common actions, 1234 for menus / weapon selections. The design of the game from top to bottom is affected by this. You swap in a controller for a keyboard, and you'll decide to change how weapon selection is presented: maybe spokes around a center so you can use a joystick instead of items in a row corresponding to numeric buttons. You add auto-aim to compensate for the inaccuracy inherent in gamepad joysticks, but the vehicle sections become easier. You might even redesign minigames (Mass Effect has a completely different hacking minigame for console and PC versions). Or look at web browsers. As soon as you hook a touch interface to the web browser you might want to pop up an on-screen keyboard in response to touch events, but you need to move the viewpoint so that you can see what you're typing. Input is inherently messy, and you can't pull semantics out of applications because you'll just make the user experience worse. ON THE OTHER HAND... > The problem is that there is no level at which I can direct a particular button on my keyboard to always mean “move left by one word”... This is available through use of common UI toolkits. I believe on OS X, you can bind a button to mean "move left by one word" in all applications which use the Cocoa toolkit (which is the vast majority of all applications on OS X). The way this works is there are some global preferences which specifies a key binding for "moveWordLeft:". The key event, when it is not handled by other handlers, then gets translated to a "moveWordLeft:" method call by NSResponder. The method for configuring these key bindings is relatively obscure, suffice it to say that you can press option+left arrow in almost any application to move left one word, and you can configure the key binding (i.e., choose a different key) across applications on a per-user basis. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSResponder_Class/index.html#//apple_ref/occ/instm/NSResponder/moveWordLeft https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...: