Hi Folks,

(below)

Quoting Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda@gmail.com:

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 4:27 PM, Nicolas Cellier nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com wrote:

...

I encountered this in Squeak too, because French keyboard is not better than german one :(

Nicolas Cellier uploaded a new version of ST80 to project The Trunk: http://source.squeak.org/trunk/ST80-nice.136.mcz

==================== Summary ====================

Name: ST80-nice.136 Author: nice Time: 4 August 2011, 10:43:00.836 am UUID: 6f8b2f4c-8c8c-48a8-ba32- bb5b37d827d0 Ancestors: ST80-ul.135

#shiftEnclose: is hardcoding the keyboard layout, which is not compatible with foreign keyboards and modern VM, and prevents correct enclosing to work.

  
 +1.  This is the issue that must be fixed.  It must be understood

properly (is the VM answering adequate information or not?).

The information provided by the VMs in keystroke events is not perfect, and it could be enhanced. I see 2 main problems (in what follows, $x denotes Character x, and [x] denotes the physical keyboard key labelled 'x'):

Problem 1) On the mac, when control or command are pressed, for any keystroke the unshifted code is returned, even if shift is pressed. For instance, let's assume an US keyboard. So, [shift]+[,] generates $< and [shift]+[.] generates $>. If you run 'Sensor kbdTest' and press [shift]+[,] you correctly get $<, but if you press [control]+[shift]+[,] or [command]+[shift]+[,] you get $,. This is bad, because to detect [command]+[<] or [control]+[<] you need to write code that not only needs to know about the platform, but also about the keyboard layout, as in many layouts $< is not generated by doing [shift]+[,], but by some other combination. The same happens with most non-alphabetic keys, that usually differ in different keyboard layouts.

Problem 2) There is a completely separated issue, and it happens both in Windows and Mac. Here, [ctrl] + [an alphabetic key] substracts 64 from the code. So, [ctrl]+[c] generates code 3. This is consistent with the traditional meaning of the ctrl key (in dumb terminals and DOS), but it makes impossible for the image to tell (for example) between [ctrl]+[Enter] and [ctrl]+[m]. The image might want to use these keystrokes for different things, so it would be much better not to substract 64 in the VM and let the image handle it. I know it could be done by handling key down and key up events, but this would also require code that is not only platform dependent but also needs to know the mapping between key codes and characters in each platform.

I haven't tested on Linux or platforms other than Windows and Mac, but things like these could also happen.

In general, [control], [command] and [alt/option] should not affect the character code of a keystroke, they should only set the appropriate flag so the image can decide what to do with them. The character code should be the same as if [control], [command] and [alt/option] were not pressed.

This is completely different for [shift], as [shift] does indeed modify the character generated, as [shift]+[8] means $* in some keyboards and $( on others. If [shift]+[someKey] is pressed, the keystroke character code should be the same as the user would get elsewhere in the platform, irrespectively of [control], [command] and/or [alt/option] being pressed or not.

Fixing these, and making the behavior consistent between platforms, would enable a few simplifications in the image. It would also enable the use of some keystroke combinations involving [command] and/or [control] that are problematic today.

best, Eliot

Thanks, Juan Vuletich