On Sat, Feb 23, 2002 at 01:01:07PM +0100, Erika Pacholleck wrote: > [22.02.02 19:05 +0100] Radovan Garabik <-- :
> > > > No, it was more like automatic compose, without the need to press > > compose first. Believe me, it is nice (I am using yudit a lot). > > When I first read about that delay tactic I thought, nice idea. > Rethinking about it gave two questions: > 1. how does it play together with kbd rate/delay being extra adjustable those are two separate things > 2. that means to have an extra config/prog kbd compose_delay yes, exactly > a professional typist will go mad to wait 1 second for the next press why? there would be no reason to wait. I'll take Esperanto as an example - the same would be valid for phonetic cyrillic layout. you have combinations cx sx hx ux jx gx - these yield special esperanto characters. Since x does not occur in Esperanto, there is no ambiguity. Not even much in foreign names, since these combinations do not occur that often in any languages I know of. So you just type "cxar" "ecx" "Euxropo" to get esperanto charaters, when you are typing a word with any of these letters (let's say "ebleco"), you hit <e> <b> <l> <e>, you see it on the display, now you hit <c>, nothing will be displayed, but it does not matter since the very next fraction of second comes <o> and the input system, seeing that this is not a compose sequence, puts <c> <o> to the underlaying terminal (or program). The timeout comes handy when you type e.g. "havas", and stop for a while to think about the next words. Then, after one second delay (this is of course configurable), <s> appears on terminal and all goes well. (sorry for the lack of utf-8 encoded esperanto characters in those examples, but I am now typing it from old 486 8-bit ISO-8859-2 only linux system :-)) > a user with eagle-tactic would never be able to make a composing > the timeout would be of course configurable - it would be even possible to turn it off. > > In fact, traditional <Compose> behaves like a sticky key - it could have > > been more like shift, to be hold while typing compose sequence > > (and it would have the advantage that the system would know when the > > composed sequence ends) > > In that case you would need an additional Compose_Lock, nothing is > is more anti-ergonomic than holding a key while typing some others. > Just my 2 cents. I agree. But current compose is rather anti-intuitive. I was showing behaviour of compose key to some users (very computer literate, just unaware of world beyond ascii), and after my explanation, _all of them_ tried to use <compose> as shift key. -- ----------------------------------------------------------- | Radovan Garabik http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ | | __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk | ----------------------------------------------------------- Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus. Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread! -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
