3 ms·

Apparently libinput is what is going to handle Wayland input and the X team is already moving to add it as an input option to x11 to ease the transition.

by hyperion2010 12y ago

gue5t 12y ago
Libinput is a low-level library that handles and normalizes evdev (kernel) events. "Input methods" here refers to high-level ways of interpreting various devices' events to produce text input for programs that accept text: on-screen keyboards, predictive input, pinyin, and so on.
- exDM69 12y ago
  Also plain old keyboard input is an important part of this. Dealing with international keyboard layouts is anything but trivial. E.g. to write ñ on my keyboard layout (fi), I need to press AltGr+~ and then n. In X11, this is handled by the XIM library. There's no shortage of applications that do this incorrectly. Particularly annoying are some games which don't get this right. The key for ", ^ and ~ is a "dead" key (doesn't produce any character output, to write ~ you press AltGr+~ and then space) which is where the US keyboard has ]. Lots of games use [] for something important, and this completely fails to work on my key layout. For game keyboard input, the game should use "raw" scan codes (which are keyboard specific) for all configurable keys. Ie. not "keysyms" and especially not character codes. International keyboard handling is very difficult. I was talking about a mostly western key layout, I don't even want to know what it's like to deal with non-western keyboard layouts (russian, greek, chinese, japanese, etc).
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    One of my pains on the early GNU/Linux days (slackware 2.0 and beyond) was to configure the keyboard for Portuguese both on the console and on X. Almost as fun as finding out the right modes not to burn the monitor.
  - ygra 12y ago
    > International keyboard handling is very difficult. I was talking about a mostly western key layout, I don't even want to know what it's like to deal with non-western keyboard layouts (russian, greek, chinese, japanese, etc). The difficulty here is getting things like dead keys, key combinations (AltGr) and Compose right. Everything after that simply generates a Unicode string in the application. At which point the script is irrelevant. In fact, the difficult parts here happen completely below anything that needs text, so language or script is a non-issue at that point.
- chongli 12y ago
  Why not have said "high level" methods available at a low level? What if I want to write Chinese in my config files while editing with vi on a tty running through the system fb console?
sandGorgon 12y ago
does anyone know if it will solve the consistent copy-paste shortcut problem in Linux. Yes, I know we cant use ctrl-c .... but the lack of consistency which I see on OSX is frustrating.

Apparently libinput is what is going to handle Wayland input and the X team is already moving to add it as an input option to x11 to ease the transition.

gue5t 12y ago

Libinput is a low-level library that handles and normalizes evdev (kernel) events. "Input methods" here refers to high-level ways of interpreting various devices' events to produce text input for programs that accept text: on-screen keyboards, predictive input, pinyin, and so on.

exDM69 12y ago
Also plain old keyboard input is an important part of this. Dealing with international keyboard layouts is anything but trivial. E.g. to write ñ on my keyboard layout (fi), I need to press AltGr+~ and then n. In X11, this is handled by the XIM library. There's no shortage of applications that do this incorrectly. Particularly annoying are some games which don't get this right. The key for ", ^ and ~ is a "dead" key (doesn't produce any character output, to write ~ you press AltGr+~ and then space) which is where the US keyboard has ]. Lots of games use [] for something important, and this completely fails to work on my key layout. For game keyboard input, the game should use "raw" scan codes (which are keyboard specific) for all configurable keys. Ie. not "keysyms" and especially not character codes. International keyboard handling is very difficult. I was talking about a mostly western key layout, I don't even want to know what it's like to deal with non-western keyboard layouts (russian, greek, chinese, japanese, etc).
- pjmlp 12y ago
  One of my pains on the early GNU/Linux days (slackware 2.0 and beyond) was to configure the keyboard for Portuguese both on the console and on X. Almost as fun as finding out the right modes not to burn the monitor.
- ygra 12y ago
  > International keyboard handling is very difficult. I was talking about a mostly western key layout, I don't even want to know what it's like to deal with non-western keyboard layouts (russian, greek, chinese, japanese, etc). The difficulty here is getting things like dead keys, key combinations (AltGr) and Compose right. Everything after that simply generates a Unicode string in the application. At which point the script is irrelevant. In fact, the difficult parts here happen completely below anything that needs text, so language or script is a non-issue at that point.
chongli 12y ago
Why not have said "high level" methods available at a low level? What if I want to write Chinese in my config files while editing with vi on a tty running through the system fb console?

sandGorgon 12y ago

does anyone know if it will solve the consistent copy-paste shortcut problem in Linux. Yes, I know we cant use ctrl-c .... but the lack of consistency which I see on OSX is frustrating.