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

Please don't remove it. I actually think it's a very good but incomplete method, and very much worth keeping. I have a proposal I've been working on to improve it, but it's not ready to submit yet.

The past state of things with SDL1 seem irrelevant, since we are using SDL2.

If you don't agree with me that it's better to have 1 fully working symbolic mapping than making all of them have several broken keys, OK, I'm not going to suggest changing minus a third time.

However, aside from that I think the symbolic mapping is a very valid approach. I'll explain more when I have time to finish my proposal.

-- Brad Smith

On Sat, Sep 9, 2023 at 4:36 AM Thomas Huth <th.huth@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Am Thu, 31 Aug 2023 16:30:25 -0400
schrieb Brad Smith <rainwarrior@xxxxxxxxx>:
....
> > 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.
>
> I think the symbolic mapping is worth keeping, at least for now.
>
> It's clear that the its mappings are not adequate for many language
> layouts, but the fact that it does work perfectly for US layout (with the 1
> proposed change) does make it useful for many users.
>
> So... for some users Hatari's keyboard can just work out of the box. For
> many other users, they need to do some setting changes. I think this is at
> least a better situation than having all users needing to figure out their
> keyboard settings. At least some can be accommodated easily this way.

OK, let me rephrase my rationale here: The symbolic mapping was always a
kind of ugly hack that never could please everybody, so many people had to
extend their mapping with external mapping files if they needed to use the
symbolic mapping. The scancode based mapping was always the better choice
everywhere it was possible to use it. The problem was: With SDL 1.x, the
scancode mapping did not work on some non-Linux systems like Mac OS X. But
this problem is gone with SDL 2.x, and since we dropped SDL 1.x support a
while ago, there is no real urgent need for keeping the controversial
symbolic mapping around anymore. I think I'm going to remove it rather
sooner than later, since it apparently causes still trouble for people.
Please simply use the scancode mapping instead. It should work properly for
all keyboard layouts - and if not, that's certainly a better place for
discussing changes to the keyboard code.

Thomas