bug#43830: keyboard layout handling incompatible with rest of the OS

[Paul Pogonyshev]

> You said this issue was successfully solved by other applications tens of
> years ago.  Do these apps allow you typing physical key '/' to get '.'
> while keeping invoking C-/, M-/ shortcuts?  I know no such applications,
> they all invoke C-. and M-., not C-/ and M-/.

Actually, I admit I haven't even thought about that. Not many apps have

so many shortcuts that they run out of letters, so I just assumed that they

work by physical key. But a quick test shows mixed results:

* KDE and GTK+ (at least Gimp) seem to work like `reverse-im', i.e. they

don't bind to physical keys, but to characters.

* LibreOffice and IntelliJ IDEA work like I described, i.e. as desired for me.

* I also discovered that even some ancient X programs (xedit) are smart

enough to hande Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Ы the same, but I have no idea how to

test Ctrl-. there.

My subconciousness doesn't distinguish between letter and non-letter keys,

it remembers shorcuts by physical position of the keys. That's why I think

the second approach (i.e. LibreOffice's and IDEA's) is better.

> But in Emacs you can do everything you want.  If `reverse-im'
> doesn't handle this automatically, you can redefine key mappings for
> '/', 'C-/' and 'M-/' manually (using some code from `reverse-im').

Can I do that automagically somehow, given that I switch keyboard layout

three times a minute when I type? Doing it once won't help anything, since

that would break shortcuts for English layout, and I want them work the

same in _all layouts_.

Paul

On Wed, 7 Oct 2020 at 21:25, Juri Linkov <juri@linkov.net> wrote:

>> All these problems are because of mismatch between your X layout and
>> your Emacs input method.  Emacs doesn't know the X layout, so you need
>> to define it in Emacs by adapting an existing input method,
>> or defining different keys manually.
>
> Sorry, I don't understand. I also don't see anything about this in the
> documentation (README).
>
> I want physical key that is '/' in English to type '.' in Russian (because
> that is what it does in russian-computer), but invoke shortcuts bound to
> C-/, M-/ etc. Is that possible with `reverse-im'?

You said this issue was successfully solved by other applications tens of
years ago.  Do these apps allow you typing physical key '/' to get '.'
while keeping invoking C-/, M-/ shortcuts?  I know no such applications,
they all invoke C-. and M-., not C-/ and M-/.

But in Emacs you can do everything you want.  If `reverse-im'
doesn't handle this automatically, you can redefine key mappings for
'/', 'C-/' and 'M-/' manually (using some code from `reverse-im').