modifier-only shortcuts

[Lubos Lunak]

On Saturday 08 July 2006 14:59, Hamish Rodda wrote:
> On Friday 07 July 2006 16:21, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> >  Moreover, one more reason against modifier-only shortcuts, besides the
> > already mentioned ones, is purely technical. It's bloody difficult, or
> > maybe even impossible, to do it correctly. As long as correct includes
> > not killing all other shortcuts using that combination. Remember the
> > Win-key-alone-opens-K-Menu feature? There were always some problems with
> > it.
> >
> >  Basically, you're not notified of key events if you don't have focus
> > unless you have keyboard grab (active or passive). You can set up a
> > passive grab on a modified combination, but for other shortcuts using
> > these modifiers to work you have to let go of the grab and then you have
> > no way[*] to find out if actually the user pressed something more or only
> > the modifiers. If you don't let go of the grab and instead try to forward
> > the presses, well, that's what the K-Menu code tried and apparently
> > nobody managed to get that working 100%.
...
> > [*] Might be there would be some X extension for input that'd give this
> > information somehow, but there's nothing like that in core X and I don't
> > know about extensions.
>
> Simon + I talked about this.  TT will not be adding support for modifier
> only shortcuts to qt.  So, as far as I can see, you'd need a process
> listening to every single keystroke in order to tell when to activate this
> shortcut. Granted, seeing that I'll be moving global shortcuts out to a
> kded process, this may be a bit cleaner to do, but not by much.  Then
> there's the issue of when the shortcut is supposed to be at application or
> window level rather than global.

 And there are still non-KDE apps for which this wouldn't change anything, so 
what I said above still stands.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
---------------------------------------------------------------------
SuSE CR, s.r.o.  e-mail: l.lunak at suse.cz , l.lunak at kde.org
Drahobejlova 27  tel: +420 2 9654 2373
190 00 Praha 9   fax: +420 2 9654 2374
Czech Republic   http://www.suse.cz/