Re: [hatari-devel] Recent symbolic keyboard mapping change

[Thomas Huth <th.huth@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 27/08/2023 21.33, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
>
> I noticed that you merged some symbolic key mapping changes.  Did you check 
> the changes against *all* (EmuTOS/MiNT) supported keyboard layouts:
>      https://tho-otto.de/keyboards/
> ?

Before you complain, you should maybe have a look at the patches first. Of 
course, I reviewed them very carefully first (and if you look at the PR, 
you'll see that I also rejected one of the changes).

First, SDLK_LEFTBRACKET and SDLK_RIGHTBRACKET... I think I simply got these 
wrong in the past when I added that code - as a non-native speaker I didn't 
realize that they mean square brackets instead of normal parantheses. So 
mapping non-keypad square brackets to the round parantheses of the keypard 
does not make too mach sense, does it? Now if you look at the US english 
keyboard layout, you can clearly see that the location of the square 
brackets there match the scancodes that they are not mapped to.

The SDLK_BACKQUOTE mapping that we had in Hatari was apparently a hack for 
the exotic MacPro keyboard that misses the "insert" key. But that keyboard 
misses other keys, too, e.g. there is also no other key that could produce 
0x29 on the ST side as far as I can see. So users of those reduced keyboards 
have to create their own mapping anyway, so IMHO it's better to use a better 
default for the BACKQUOTE key here for the majority of users.

> Hatari mapping does not conform to any of the real TOS keyboard layouts, but 
> changing it can break people's existing keymap file configs. Therefore I'm 
> against changing it until there's a full fix, making symbolic keymaps to 
> change at run-time based on given TOS version keyboard layout.

IMHO before we go with any bigger extension of the keyboard mapping code, we 
should mostly get rid of the symbolic mapping code in that file. It's mostly 
a leftover from the SDL 1.2 era where the scancode mapping was not working 
reliably on all host OSes.

But that's a bigger change that should maybe rather be done after the next 
release. ... by the way, it's been more than a year again since the last one 
.... Nicolas, do you have any plans for a new release?

 Thomas