Improved keyboard input required for Ultimate Development Workstation

Explains what improvements need to be made to Linux keyboard input in order to achieve the Ultimate Development Workstation.

As my personal preference is for Linux, I take a brief aside to comment on what Linux needs to achieve the Ultimate Development Workstation.

Full Multiple keyboard support

As stated in Hardware for the Ultimate Development Workstation, multiple keyboards are needed to fully realise the goal. XWindows, the last time I checked, only supported multiple keyboards if they have different consoles, or the same keyboard mapping. But different keyboard mappings are necessary to achieve the ultimate development workstation (see the hardware article).

It looks like the Multi-pointer X Server will, as a side effect, allow keyboards the needed functionality. A private message stated:

Yeah, at the moment it's scheduled for X11R7.5. We'll see if we get there in time.

Naturally, I'm hoping that it will. I'd also like to see it in xorg.

Keyboard Macros

As programmers, it would be nice if we could assign keyboard event sequences to certain keys. We're not just talking about remapping the keyboard here, but about assigning sequences of characters to a keystroke. It would be even nicer if these could be assigned to vary depending on which type of window had focus.

This is necessary so that a single keystroke could produce the code:

 for() {
 }

This would naturally be attached to the second keyboard.

It seems that the only way to do this is with xmacro. There are three versions available.

• Sourceforge xmacro. Unfortunately, that program doesn't seem to have been updated since 2001. It depends on epm to build rpms and debs. There are two patches available.

• Qball's xmacro. Last updated 2007. No information as to whether it incorporates the patches mentioned above.

• Alex Haan's xmacro. No information as to whether it includes the patches above.

The most useful discussion I found of the issue was at http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-299524.html .

It would be nice if xmacro was made into a single co-ordinated version on Sourceforge.

It would also be nice if macros were supported by the kernel so that they worked even outside XWindows. But xmacro is sufficient.

Summary

The ultimate development workstation could probably be pretty closely approximated without the keyboard macros, but not without the multiple keyboard support.