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Danuvius
Guru
Joined: 18 Sep 2004
Posts: 375
Location: Toronto
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 Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2005 12:39 am Post subject: X Keyboard Problem Killing Me |
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I am rather past being fed-up. The designers and implementors of X's keyboard handling subsystem have earned my life-long loathing and disrespect.
What do I want? Customise my dead-keys. Is it possible? Philosophically speaking: assuredly.
So anyways... I gave it a try. I'm a tough guy--installed and setup gentoo from scratch dozens of times by now. Surely changing dead keys from "^ + o = o with circumflex" to "^ + o = o with double acute accent" can't be so hard. So I googled and googled. Searched. Asked.
Roughly... nobody seems to know a damn thing. The only pages coming up in google are highly outdated and do not go into customising dead keys.
Lots of people seem very enthusiastic about "mode_change" and "multi_key"... but, to me, they really are no more useful than the possibility of copying and pasting every special character.
I type, a lot, in Hungarian, English, and other languages. Dead keys are the only convenient solution... or, rather, they would be if I could make 4 bloody changes so I can create the required double acute characters.
Sorry about the rant...
=== MY ACTUAL PROBLEM ===
It appears that among the surely at least half dozen widely scattered (presumably) related file types that constitute the keyboard handling subsystem of X... one is called Compose (the one of interest to me is: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose ).
These files **appear to be** plaintext files that describe what key combinations should result in what characters being output.
Just what I wanted!! Right?
| Code: | | <dead_circumflex> <O> : "Ô" U00D4 # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH CIRCUMFLEX |
But alas no... any change to the file in question results in all dead keys and dead key combinations outputting a (presumably the same) non-dislayable unicode character. Are you wondering if I forgot to back things up? No--I did not. Restoring the original file did not help however. What did? Oh... just an "# emerge xorg-x11".
After that was done and I noted with pleasure that the dead keys worked again as they used to; I tried again. This time I did not just backup via cp; this time I tarred the whole locale directory with file-permission preservation on.
Alas, a change in the Compose file yet again rendered dead keys useless. And yet again, restoring the original (the whole bloody directory) did nothing.
My only (deeply surreal) explanation is that the plaintext file does not directly govern behavior... rather it is a sorce file for some sort of "compiling"... and someone, in their best-left-adjectiveless intelligence, decided to fall back to some non-functional default if the compiled file did not appear to originate from the current source.
No... I don't think my explanation makes the tiniest bit of sense... but I can't think of any other explanation for the behavior.
Unfortunately... I haven't a clue what to do in order to solve this... short of re-emerging xorg. And, of course, that would still leave me with the dilemma of the uncustomisable dead keys.
If anyone knows how to make bloody X.org do what the damn Compose file says... I would be ever so thankful!
I am far far beyond my wits' end. This whole thing has been a collossal waste of time and like-sized source of frustration. Makes me cry back windows' completely-hacked-together-crap yet ***far far more functional*** keyboard hooking keymap customisation programs. Yes... even the shareware crap.
urgh... ;-(
As the Beatles sang, "Please, please help me!"
Ps.: Yes, I restarted X... in fact I restarted the whole computer several times after restoring original files... it really does nothing. |
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TheAl
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 22 Jan 2004
Posts: 134
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vbar
n00b
Joined: 27 Dec 2005
Posts: 2
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2006 4:49 pm Post subject: Re: X Keyboard Problem Killing Me |
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[quote="Danuvius"]My only (deeply surreal) explanation is that the plaintext file does not directly govern behavior... rather it is a sorce file for some sort of "compiling"... and someone, in their best-left-adjectiveless intelligence, decided to fall back to some non-functional default if the compiled file did not appear to originate from the current source.
Having had an occasion to (try to) configure my X keyboard recently, I noticed (among much fascinating material - see, for example, http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/xkb/html/xkb.html) the xkbcomp utility, and I bet the keyboard definitions are, in fact, compiled. Whether that causes your problem is, of course, another matter, but you might want to check the directories mentioned in ``man xkbcomp''. |
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