GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 108021
Merge gkb functionality into control-center
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
It should be possible to change keyboard types in the control center, since this is a much more intuitive place to change a desktop setting.
If we do that the keyboard layout backend stuff needs to move out of gnome-applets. Probably makes sense.
Gswitchit (http://gswitchit.sourceforge.net/), a gkb replacement available in GNOME cvs in the module "gswitchit", already has a control center page. Perhaps gkb should be replaced by gswitchit in a future GNOME release.
> Perhaps gkb should be replaced by gswitchit in a future GNOME release. That would be worth bringing up in the soon-to-come GNOME 2.4 module GEP. Not much point discussing it further in a bug, though; it belongs on mailing lists.
I don't mind to discuss this in any mailing list - just let me know where. Will desktop-devel-list be ok?
Probably. But note: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-March/msg00311.html The code exists.
The code? Which code? In a very best case it puts gkb properties into control-center. But I highly doubt (would be glad to be wrong at this point) it makes gkb revolutionary better in xkb area. Actually, gkb is good for X servers without xkb extension - but it does not use all the xkb sweetness. Well, the current situation seems to be more or less ok. For gkb is good enough for _all_ cases (including proprietary X servers, including hardware X terminals). But distributions shipped with XFree are able to take gswitchit from 5th toy and have all its advantages. Or is this bad?
Sergey I don't understand your comment. My patch adds a capplet wrapper to gkb-new and another will move the keybinding that switches the layouts from gkb into the settings daemon. All of the current data remains where it is for now. Can you expand on what you mean ?
One can customize gkb endlessly (in Control Center or anywhere else). The facts about gkb are: 1. (-) gkb is not xkb-aware. It just invokes setxkbmap to change the WHOLE XKB CONFIGURATION. It is expensive thing - to reload the whole config. Instead of just calling a couple of xkb functions to change the group. 2. (-) gkb does not take advantage of all the available xkb options (related to indicators, special keys, ...). It just does not have configuration repository to know about these things. Some while ago gswitchit introduced the module xfree86.xml (now it is in XFree 4.3.0) to make the UI configuration tools development easier. libxklavier gives some API to access this repository. 3. (-) gkb currently does not allow per-window layout tracking. And it makes sense - since setxkbmap invocation is expensive, it would be not too nice to call it on every window switch. 4. (+) Not bound to xkb, gkb can use ANY number of layouts. gswitchit sets up xkb configuration only once - so it is limited by 4 groups. 5. (+) gkb works in environments where xkb is not available. In Xnest, in old/proprietary X servers.
This has been done.