Maliit, Plasma Active and Mer

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Monday 21 May 2012 19:26:08 Marco Martin wrote:
> yeah, now sizes are still mostly hardcoded as the old qml one i started on
> (size is smaller to adapt to vivaldi)
> i plan to use dpi there as well.

I finally had my first chance to see Maliit Active live in action (on Mer), and 
it generally I like it a lot!
Even though the keys are currently way too small on the Mer x86 image on a 
Wetab (partly because they are not dpi-aware yet, partly because the 
resolution seems too high there anyway, as pretty much everything is too 
small), the keyboard layout works a lot better than that of the old keyboard 
for me. It seems a lot more logical and I find keys much more easily.

The only case where it works even less good than the old one is in a terminal, 
mostly because it lacks a tab key.
Since the primary target group for Plasma Active in its early days are most 
likely geeks, I think offering good support for the terminal is important.

However since many keys that are often needed in a terminal (like tab and 
arrow keys) are rarely needed in usual mobile usecases, we shouldn't clutter 
the normal layouts with them. What I think does make sense, though, is having 
a third (or rather fifth) layout specific for terminal use which includes all 
keys regularly needed there (letters, /, ., |, <,>, ~, -, arrow keys and maybe 
a few more). If that's soo many keys, it may contain only tab and arrow keys 
so the user can at least switch to it when needed.
Can we do that for PA or does it have to be implemented in Maliit?

Cheers,
Thomas