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

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 8:23 PM, Gonzalo Odiard <godiard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Presumably there is a way to detect which keyboard is installed in the
machine? While I love Gonzalo's use of the F5-F8 keys, the need for
Frame and Journal keys on the non-membrane keyboards is more important
in my experience.

regards.

-walter

> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
>
>



-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org