Re: Virtual Consoles

You (Gavin Thomas Nicol) wrote:
>
> Well, Andy has been busy again :-)
>
> I think the port mapping functionality you described will be quite
> useful, but I'm slightly concerned about having the keyboard driver
> built into part of the console driver. Mightn't it be better to have
> downloadable keymaps, and use a special escape sequence to toggle
> betwen virtual screens. (ie. if the user presses ALT+SHIFT+F10, the
> escape sequence "ESC [ VC 10" might be generated)? This would be more
> flexible I think.

I agree (Although I would like the escape sequence to have the same
format as the other sequences, so it would have to be ESC [ 1 0 V (or
something like this, V may be already in use)).

>
> I have been planning to rewrite the keyboard driver to handle
> downloadable maps for some time, and I have quite a lot of the design
> work done. Shall I code it up?

I have recently rewritten the Minix console driver to handle
downloadable keymaps. Actually, this is the third time I have done
this. The current version allows up to eight modifier keys, strings up
to 15 bytes per key and numeric entry of codes in base 10 (like
alt+numeric keypad in DOS) and 16. I am not yet quite happy with some
internals: The translation table could be smaller and faster to search,
and removing keymappings is tricky.

        hp

-- 
   _  | hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at | Peter Holzer | TU Vienna | CS/Real-Time Systems
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