On fre, 2007-10-05 at 10:12 +0100, ext Sergey Udaltsov wrote: > > How exactly should that work when switching between applications? > There can be 3 scenarios: > 1. If you switch to the "classic" app (which does not support > "context-driven" layouts), there are no changes: > - if DE/WM implements "layout per window" mode, each application > "remembers" its layout. > - otherwise the layout is preserved on switching > 2. If the app supports "context-driven" layouts, the layout would be > changed depending on where you caret would be put to, immediately > after switch.
So, let's say I'm writing a document. Most of the document is in my native language, Swedish. Naturally I have my keyboard layout set to Swedish. Some parts of the document is in German and (British) English. If moving the cursor into the German text would suddenly swap the keyboard layout to qwertz, I'd be *very* *very* *very* upset. I'd be similarly upset if the brackets and square brackets suddenly shifted to the position where I normally expect "å" and "¨" to be normally. People who write multi-lingual documents that necessitate a keyboard layout that differs from the one they normally use are a minority. A very small one. A minority that won't suffer from having to move the mouse cursor all the way up (or down, left, or right) to their menu bar to switch the keyboard layout (there are probably even ways to map keyboard shortcuts built into the various desktop environments to do this). A general rule of thumb in software design is to optimise for the common case while allowing the special case where feasible. In this case, the common case is mono-lingual or at most bi-lingual documents in related scripts (or combinations of scripts from cultures that normally have dual script keyboards, such as Japan), not multi-lingual documents. The special case can still be dealt with by the user through a simple mouse action or a keyboard combination (and most of the newer keyboards these days are crawling with extra function keys that makes it unnecessary to even use keyboard combinations; a single key press will do). [snip] Regards: David _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
