Haiku’s monthly activity report for August has been published, and it’s a big one, so I urge you to read the whole report for all the details on what’s changed, fixed, and new in Haiku over the past month. There should be something for everyone in there.
My personal favourite little tidbit is this one, though.
Pascal Abresch got the first part of his work to handle “media” keys (play, pause, and other additional keys) recognized by Haiku. The PS/2 driver has been adjusted, but adding all these new keys to the keymap means we now have more than 128 possible keys, which the BeOS keymap format does not allow. So we will need a new one, and this will break compatibility with old apps using the keymap directly (as the API allows).
I don’t know why, exactly, this fascinates me so much, but I like the mental image of one of the original BeOS developers, coding for Hobbit development boards, writing the code for keyboard handling, deciding upon the 128 key limit being enough for a long time to come.
If only they knew.
Awwww, but i wanted to use an Emoji keyboard in NetPositive…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIFE7h3m40U
This has to do with programs that access the keymap API… most software doesn’t. A browser for instance almost certainly wouldn’t acess the keymap API.
Correction, you would *hope* that a browser would not access the keymap API. I’ve seen some strange things hook into the keymap APIs on some operating systems, particularly Windows. BeOS being rather mod-friendly as it was, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that more things access the raw keyboard input than one might suspect.
“but I like the mental image of one of the original BeOS developers, coding for Hobbit development boards, writing the code for keyboard handling, deciding upon the 128 key limit being enough for a long time to come” – More likely, it’s because the keycode sent from the keyboard is 8 bits, with the MSB indicating the make/break status (i.e. press or release). So it’s only natural to limit the keycode to 7 bits (which maxes out at 127). However, it seems likely Haiku abused the keymap to also store “virtual” or “alternative” key strokes, not just the hardware key codes, so now it’s full :).
https://twitter.com/rakyll/status/620822247758893057
https://imgur.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards/jCwHt
Most Japanese keyboards have a similar number of keys to the keyboards you find in the US, Europe (and most of the rest of the world for that matter)
https://www.branah.com/japanese
Yeah, but the added “AltGr” characters still adds many keycodes to the keyboard.