At 19:19 03/13/2005 -0800, Stewart Stremler wrote: >begin quoting Wade Curry as of Sun, Mar 13, 2005 at 05:41:47PM -0800: >[snip] >> I overheard a couple of guys one day saying something like: "Hey, >> LCDs can be really tiny these days. Why don't they put them on >> computer keyboards, on the keys themselves, then they could show >> what the current mapping is." >> >> I suppose it would be seen as an expensive item to put in a laptop, >> since not many people would really use it... but _I_ want it! :-) >> (easy way to get rid of the "Windows" key, too :-) ) > >Heh. Even if it was an expensive third-party "solution", it would be >way cool. You could talk about your "keyboard font", download custom >graphics to the keys, upcase all the letters when you held down "shift", >etc. etc. > >It would make the fn-keypad "mapping" far easier to work with as well. > >> I also want a /etc/keyboard/kbd[.appname] file, easily overridable >> by ~/config/.kbd[.appname] file with my favorite mappings. > >Not so sure I see the need for a per-application mapping, but having >/proc/keyboard/map that you could cp ~/.kbd.appname on to might be a >useful thing to have... > >-Stewart "Perhaps tweakable by PID?" Stremler
Depending on what you need for a keyboard, you could consider just using a touch screen for the "keyboard" and a regular screen for the main display. Then you could do things like maps, object manipulation, etch-a-sketch, etc. depending on what you need. The feel wouldn't be there but the machine probably wouldn't be primarily used for typing. Actually, thinking about this, I could see building a transparent keyboard out of some elastomeric material that lays down on top of the touchscreen. Or maybe even clear hard plastic that with a little optical engineering would act as light guides to the key tops. All the technology is there, now to get the startup seed money... Gus "Establishing Prior Art" Wirth -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
