More devices into the Shortcut system...

[todd rme]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 12:57 AM, Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> wrote:
> El Dimarts, 20 de desembre de 2011, a les 21:48:30, Rick Stockton va escriure:
>> It is time for us to "Fish, or Cut Byte" on two alternative ways to
>> introduce Mouse-Oriented Shortcuts into Qt5 and KDE-Next:
>>
>> Todd RME has been suggesting a new design- oriented around DBUS.
>> Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that coding. Todd, if your design
>> gets a more favorable review from THIS group, within the next few days,
>> I'll try to assist you in your work (as best as I can; I'm definitely
>> not the brightest person here.)
>>
>> As an alternative, I'm suggesting the idea of enhancing one or two of
>> the existing classes: I'd prefer to enhance the current QShortCutEvent
>> and QShortCut scheme, so that they can include Mouse Button events
>> within a QKeySequence. (This will including the possibility of _only_
>> one or more Mouse Buttons, with no keyboard event at all.) If that
>> proves difficult, I could create new Classes to do this-- but I think I
>> can use the 'hasExtendedInfo' trick which one of the smart Qt guys has
>> used to handle a variety of Signatures in the  QtMouseEvent() code. I
>> can work with *this* stuff on my own.
>>
>> Please give opinions soon, as we have only 3-5 weeks before the Qt5 API
>> goes into soft freeze. After we have Mouse Buttons done, the same design
>> could be extended to handle other input devices (joystick, multitouch,
>> and so on.)
>
> After reading this mail i feel like i don't have all the information to give
> an opinion since i did not get any pointer to learn what is the Todd RME DBUS
> design.
>
> Albert

Please take a look here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171295
Or here: http://neverendingo.blogspot.com/2010/11/matter-of-control-state-of-input-device.html

The short version of the idea is to extend the existing dbus-based
keyboard shortcut system to allow developers to support other devices
besides just keyboards.  Users would be able to install plug-ins that
provide button press events from other devices besides just keyboards.

The dbus service would be very simple and generic, just providing a
way to register or unregister devices and receive button press events
from the plugins.  Things like configuring devices, deciding how to
name the button presses, making sure devices of a particular type
(like multiple keyboards) don't conflict, and other such issues would
be handled by the plugins in whatever way is appropriate for the
device.

The plugins wouldn't have to be physical devices, either.  They could
be things like voice recognition (such as simon), time-based triggers,
even online signals.  If someone wants to provide shortcut events for
something, they just need to write the appropriate plugin.  Of course
none of the plugins would actually do anything unless the user
specifically associates an event with a shortcut, and button presses
would be tied to individual plugins so no plugin could steal the
shortcuts of another plugin.

The idea would be that systems like kremotecontrol, simon, even games
looking to use joysticks buttons, could all work through the same
interface, instead of needing the half-dozen or so radically different
shortcut systems and user interfaces we have now.

Initially (i.e. for frameworks 5) this could all be behind-the-scenes
changes.  Basically just create the dbus interface and port the
keyboard handler to use it.  Once that is done, support for additional
devices and changes in the gui to support them could come later.

-Todd