As I work on a mnemonic keyboard layout, it would be great to have some positional keys that would be fix on the keyboard, independent on the keyboard layout.
For example having the grave accent key in the left corner on top of the tab-key for one function fixed would be great for the usability, if people from different countries want to use the same keyman-keyboard, although the remaining keys should be mnemonic.
Is there something like a “positional keycode” ?
Thank you, Saarthaka, for the brilliant idea. Let’s see what the developers have to say regarding this.
It’s tricky. There are certain keys, e.g. F1, which never generate a character and which could be treated as positional. However, any key which generates a character can be either mnemonic or positional, not both. For example, grave accent on French AZERTY normally generates superscript 2; on German layout (QWERTZ) it generates mu. Other layouts use it for other characters. That particular key is probably the least problematic of any character-generating key; all others are much more variable (and more used). So I’m not sure how we do this in a way that doesn’t cause problems, where it is actually useful for more than just one key on the keyboard!
In a mnemonic keyboard, virtual key code gives an error. Thats why it would be great to have more possibilities of easy to reach keys on a fixed position for e.g. (simple vedic) accents. All the keys around “enter” are not neaded for my keyboard, so they would be free for that.
I just got the idea, because friends from the UK asked me to put the accents on the same positional key as I use them. Now I would have to do two different layouts or give different possibilites for different keyboards through set(options) which makes it quite complicated.
But I’m happy I have come this far. I hope I find as good manuals for making the documentation as your keyboard programming documentation.
It’s something worthy of consideration. We’d need to do significant updates to the Engine and Compiler in order to make this work, though, so it’s not a little job.
I would want to see some tests in the compiler to validate for key combination conflicts for known Latin script layouts – this could be tricky to implement but would help the keyboard developer to know if their keyboard was usable or not on other systems.
Note that you can use the baselayout statement to make rules for specific base keyboards without needing either options or separate keyboards. That may get you where you need to go?
Thank you! We’ve worked hard on the documentation so I’m so glad it is helpful for you.
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