[Sugar-devel] behaviour of F-keys on XO HS

[Gonzalo Odiard]

May be it's too late, but i was modifying Paint to use the slider keys
(F5,F6,F7,F8) to change the size of the brush. I know there aren't other
uses of slider in Sugar, but I think it's useful and expressive to have keys
to enlarge or reduce the brush, the fonts,etc.
If we need F5 and F6 to the journal and the frame we can use F7 and F8 to
change sizes but will be different in the actual keyboards and the HS
keyboard.
You will have other problem with the actual keyboard definition.Pressing fn
with any slider key gives no event at all.

Gonzalo


On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On the XO HS (highschool edition, the one with a more "normal"
> keyboard) we're facing some questions about how the F keys should
> function, under sugar and GNOME.
>
> The technicalities are in http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/10213 and here
> is a picture of the keyboard:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Spanish_Non-membrane_Keyboard
>
> Under non-sugar environments (e.g. GNOME), myself and Paul are in
> agreement that in order to change brightness and volume, you should
> press e.g. Fn+F9 (to decrease brightness).
>
> This matches behaviour of "normal" laptops, including the Dell that
> I'm writing on. Linux already has mechanisms (once through hal, now
> through udev) so that when I press Fn+F8 on my Dell, X receives the
> "volume down" key press (instead of the Fn+F8 key press), matching
> what is printed on the keyboard.
>
>
> We want all of the unmodified F-keys to send the normal F-key events
> (we don't want to map them especially). This is for maximum
> compatibility with non-sugar environments.
>
>
> For Sugar we have an open question.
> The F1-F4 keys have the zoom levels printed on them, and pressing the
> keys unmodified will cause the zoom levels to change (because this is
> how Sugar is already coded, it responds to the literal F1 keypress).
>
> The other keys are:
>  - F5: search/journal
>  - F6: frame
>  - F9: brightness down
>  - F10: brightness up
>  - F11: volume down
>  - F12: volume up
>
> For these other keys, when using Sugar, should the user have to press
> the Fn modifier while pressing the key in order to reach the named
> function?
>
> The advantage of not having to press Fn (i.e. the keys would work
> unmodified) is that sugar works the way it always has on XO (we retain
> consistency with XO-1).
> As for the other option, the advantage of requiring Fn is that we gain
> consistency between Sugar and GNOME, and between the XO HS and
> "normal" laptops (where Fn *is* necessary to reach those alternate
> functions). (but we do end up with some confusion with the zoom level
> keys,which will continue to work unmodified)
>
> If we decide to make the keys available unmodified in Sugar we would
> have to change sugar (worldwide, not interested in downstream forked
> patches) so that F5 on any system opens the journal, F6 on any system
> opens the frame, etc. How would people feel about that?
>
> cheers,
> Daniel
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