GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 698412
Popup character variations when a key is held down
Last modified: 2021-07-05 14:29:42 UTC
We currently do this for the onscreen keyboard - if I hold down "a", I get a helpful popup showing variations of the letter (à, á, â, ä, etc). We should do the same thing for physical keyboards too - this would be a really easy way to enter different latin characters. This implies that we would do away with "repeat keys" (holding down a key would show the popup, not enter the same character repeatedly).
Technically this can't be done in X11 since the compositor doesn't see input events itself, they go directly to the client application. It could be done on gtk+ today but then it wouldn't be consistent with other toolkits. It should also be possible to do on Wayland. But, to be honest, I'm not sure this is such a good idea. Hardware and software keyboards are so different that I don't think we should shoehorn one's features into the other. I fear that that would only end up in frustration for users.
What is the use case for the key repeat? I can't think of one.
Holding space for aligning code.
(In reply to comment #0) > This implies that we would do away with "repeat keys" (holding down a key would > show the popup, not enter the same character repeatedly). We cannot remove repeat keys, it's used for accessibility. (In reply to comment #3) > Holding space for aligning code. Holding backspace to remove code. Holding shift and the cursor keys to select code. :)
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