On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 10:55 PM, Jason WOODARD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> There was some discussion on lyx-users a few years ago about patching Qt
> to swap the Command and Control keys on the Mac for people who use Emacs
> key bindings:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg49883.html.
>
> Since then, Jens Noeckel and I have occasionally compiled binaries with
> the patch and posted links to them at
> http://wiki.lyx.org/Mac/LyXmodifierKeys.  This is obviously not ideal.
>
> I finally got around to making a better patch that configures the
> swapping behavior at runtime based on a property in a preferences file.
> The patch is appended below.  Details are posted on the LyXmodifierKeys
> wiki page, along with a patched Universal binary of LyX 1.5.4 (built
> with Qt/Mac 4.3.4) and scripts to create and apply the patch to a clean
> Qt source distribution.  I also compiled and tested against the SVN
> trunk (r24030), and it appears to work fine.
>
> I believe the performance impact is negligible -- one or two extra "if"
> tests on a static boolean each time a modifier key is pressed -- and
> there is no change in Qt's behavior unless swapping is enabled.  Thanks
> to Jens and Chris Menzel (on copy), it has now been tested on both PPC
> and Intel Macs under both Tiger and Leopard.
>
> Would the folks who maintain the Mac binaries (Bennett in particular)
> consider incorporating this patch into future "official" Mac releases?


I wouldn't object on principle, but to be honest, I'm very likely to forget
to apply this patch when I upgrade to new versions of Qt, with predictable
bad consequences. I wouldn't, for example, want to re-release a version of
LyX simply because I forgot to patch Qt, and then have hundreds of Mac users
think they need to download it again just so that 10 people -- people who
are probably savvy enough to compile their own -- can get this hidden,
specialized feature. And I wouldn't want to try to explain to standard users
why they don't need to download this "updated" version.

Given this, I guess my sense is that this is so specialized that users who
want it can take advantage of OSS to roll their own, as you have done thus
far. But I'm just guessing. Do we have any clear sense how many Mac users
would use this (and what proportion this would be out of the total Mac user
base)?

Another option would be for me to hand over the duties of releasing Mac
binaries to someone else who wouldn't be so forgetful ... and who could
perhaps invest more energy and time (not to mention knowledge and skill!) to
getting things to work better on Mac. I'm thinking in particular of the
sorry state of the Mac installer and the desirability of rolling the
functions of the installer in to LyX.app itself. -- See the thread here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-devel@lists.lyx.org/msg133751.html

Bennett

Reply via email to