>Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 14:56:08 -0500 (EST)
>From: "Mark H. Wood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>I don't think you're going to find a complete and satisfactory solution. A
>classical terminal has two kinds of shift key, in pairs whose members are
>indistinct, which by themselves don't cause the terminal to emit any sort
>of signal.
Yes, and such a terminal is wrong for DOS applications which
can check actual shift key state. DosEmu has disadvantage here,
too: it does not distinguish LeftShift and RightShift, and
LeftCtrl and RightCtrl - it accepts just one code for every of
these pairs. Hope there is no much applications using these
keys differently. For Alt keys (LeftAlt and RightAlt), DosEmu
does what it should do, RightAlt is named GrayAlt in its doc.
I assume the only way to keep things comfortable is to make
the terminal emulator sending all keys, and the only problem
is need to control the emulator... by some key, there must be
some key sequence which is recognized as local control rather
then a sequence to send. Or maybe use mouse - if available.
> DOS app.s mostly expect a PC keyboard, which has three kinds
>of shift keys and whose shift keys emit distinct codes of their own. The
>two keyboards are not conformable without hacks like declaring e.g. Alt-F1
>to be a Ctrl analogue or a special-key introducer. Some terminals may
No, no, no. Well, if there is some Real Programmer at the
terminal, he can use it. But when average uses sees on the
screen "Press Alt-F1 for help" from an application he uses,
and when he does it and the application gets Ctrl... it is
really hard for average user to use such a terminal!
For this reason I attempt to make keyboard working as it
is written on it. One of hardest case I had with some FTP
telnet which was connecting to INT 9 to get scancodes,
and then sent its predefined sequences - no, no macros,
users had no ability to decide what sequences it will use,
they might use keyboard mapping to decide which key is
which, but not what keys can be. I wanted it to be used
with some DOS emulator, and it needed some sequences -
of couse unlikely these FTP telnet sent. I fixed it - by
writing a program which changed interrupt vectors to get
control of keyboard interrupt, and simulater the interrupt
for FTP telnet. It was really nice to press Alt-Ctrl-Del
on my computer and see the DOS emulator reboot on remote!
Jerzy
