[mythtv-theming] (rant, bad language) virtual keyboard definitions

[Sam Jacobs]

On 10 May 2014 at 09:34:48, Paul Harrison (mythtv at sky.com) wrote:
> Good morning Sam,
>  
> First please don't swear on the mailing list. It doesn't bother me in
> the slightest I hear worse than that at work every day :) but some
> people get offended. I do know you are only letting of a little stream :)

Yeah, I *really* broke “Don’t Write Angry”! Many thanks for not responding in kind—I rather suspect that you’re a better person than I, especially since I now notice that you wrote much of the code I was trashing. I don’t think I could’ve been quite so level headed in the face of a similar onslaught…

I apologise both to you, Paul, and to anyone else I may have offended.


> Now you point it out it isn't idea to say the least. Sometimes things
> develop in strange ways and that is what we are left with. I think the
> problem here is some people wanted the movement in the keyboard to wrap
> at the edges, so if you move all the way to the right you would be moved
> to the far left.

If the keyboard was arranged in a grid, then it would be “trivial” (for a given value of trivial) to parse the <position>/<area> elements in the XML and calculate which widget is above, below, etc. the currently focused widget. The supplied keyboard.xml staggers the keys, which would presumably make the calculations more complex.

Part of the problem I’m facing is that even though the <LANG>.xml files all map to the same layout as defined in keyboard.xml, the <move> elements are still in <LANG>.xml.


> To the best of my knowledge MythUI widgets don't have a way to say when
> you press right in this widget move to this widget which is why you have
> this strange arrangement with the movements defined in separate xml
> files. Originally some keyboard layouts had more keys than others to
> match real keyboard layouts for some international users. That was later
> changes so at least now there is only one keyboard-ui.xml file.

Well there’s the <focusorder> “attribute”, but that’s one dimensional—as far as I can tell, a MythUI window itself doesn’t support two dimensional widget navigation *at all*. RIGHT and DOWN both move to the next widget in <focusorder> order, falling back to the order they are defined in the XML.


> There is no doubt this can be improved but how often do keyboard layouts
> get changed? I think you are the first to do so and there are more
> important things that need looking at first.

There are *many* more important things, I know—there always are. However, since I don’t know C++, hopefully my work on this only takes time away from my own projects. Well, except when I post a borderline abusive message and you take the time to write such a graceful reply.

Thanks,
Sam


--  
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