From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Foreign keyboard layout
From: forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk
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Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 23:10:18 +0100
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you can map Shift and some of the other special keys
elsewhere in the Unicode space; it's not quite like
the use of 0200 by the old shells.


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Subject: Re: [9fans] Foreign keyboard layout
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Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 23:43:44 +0200

azerty support is advancing, but i'm now at the point
of a pc/kbd.c hack or re-write to get it support certain
latin1 chars and shift/alt/alt-gr to work right.

the problem, but i'll have to study the code, is that it
uses the 8th bit to indicate a shifted char and then a series
of chars in the bottom end of the latin1 codespace to indicate
shift/ctrl/alt/etc.

this is a big problem because the runes are overloaded 'cos
an azerty keyboard 'generates' stuff with the 8th bit set.

this is reminiscent of the way the bourne shell used the
8th bit to indicate quoting -- yuk, and that's before
we get to the sigsegv memory management ...

a quick hack would be to use the 16th bit, but that may
provoke exactly the same problem further down the track,
which i most certainly want to avoid.

i hope i don't have to read the unicode spec -- gag ...


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