Easy shift / ctrl / AltGr... hack.

[teika]

An implementation in C, "keydouble" is developed by "baskerville" aka "bloom" in the ArchLinux forum. See the web site hosted at github. You may find the news at the Arch forum thread.

[teika]

Xorg has released xf86-input-evdev-2.7.0. It has multitouch support.

I've merged it to my hack, which is available at the GIT repo, "master" branch. I don't make a release at least for a week, but you can try it. (It's been running for 30 min without problem. =)

To use the multitouch support, you need:
>=x11-base/xorg-server-1.11.99.901 (masked. enjoy)
>=x11-proto/inputproto-2.1.99.3
sys-libs/mtdev

At-home-modifier itself doesn't have any progress since the last release.

I don't have any multitouch device, so I won't test it.

Regards.

[teika]

Hi, folks. Not a news of ahm update, but of a good keyboard.

keyboard glossary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_technology
http://www.overclock.net/t/491752/mechanical-keyboard-guide

I recommend Japanese keyboards for at-home-modifier, because you can press many keys with thumbs. Image here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Japanese.svg

The bottom row of my keyboard is:
Esc-BS-Spc-Ret-Tab and
Alt-Shift-Ctrl-Shift-Alt
(The middle one is the space bar.) as described in the README of ahm. Japanese keyboards enable such stunt which is really comfy.

I use a membrane keyboard, whose touch is bad for your finger. There hasn't been good keyboards with enough many thumb keys.

Recently a new keyboard with "cherry mx brown switch", OWL-KB109BM(B)IIB, came out:
http://www.owltech.co.jp/products/keyboard/KB109BM_B_II/KB109BM_B_II.html (Japanese)
You can buy one from amozon.co.jp, at 8000 yen or so (roughly equal to $100; these days yen is high.). They offer an English interface, too. I dislike google/apple/amazon monopoly, though. (Who likes?)
There's also "cherry mx blue" one, OWL-KB109BM(B)II, too. They say blue is noisy.

There's already many other cherry switch or capacitive switch Japanese keyboards, but they have a long space bar, which doesn't suit my purpose.

I haven't bought yet. Not cheap, but interesting. Night night.

[hasufell]

has this bug been reported to

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/

if not, how are they supposed to know?

[teika]

Good question.

Peter Hutterer, a developer of X input drivers, said here that my fork couldn't be merged upstream, and I understand it's correct.

Fortunately, it's possible to do almost all totally in user space. keydouble can be recommended to some extent as a replacement of my hack. (But it interferes with e.g. AutoKey. Both Keydouble and AutKey use X Record extension.)

[teika]

At-home-modifier-2.7.1 is released. (Called whimsically 2.7.1, not 2.7.0.) It merges the upstream 2.7.0, but has no changes in ahm since 2.6.4.

Modifications from the upstream 2.7.0 are:
* An upstream bugfix of horizontal scroll, X.Org Bug 46205, is included. (The fix is published after the 2.7.0 release.)
* Added an option to configure script "--without-mtdev". The upstream code always checks mtdev, and enables it when found. If you don't pass the above option, it falls back to the original behavior.

I've added a USE flag "mtdev" to the ebuilds below. If you enable it, it's built with multitouch support. (sys-libs/mtdev is not yet stabilized.)

Read README for the details.

Ebuilds:
* xf86-input-evdev-2.7.0-r1.ebuild
* xf86-input-evdev-2.7.1.ebuild

Both compiles from the same source code. The former uses the Xorg's + my patch, while the latter downloads all from my repo. Obviously the former is safer.

Notice
Probably I don't develop any more this hack as a fork of xf86-input-evdev, by the reason in the previous post. (And personally I'm terribly weakened.)

If you want some progress, improve "Keydouble" or so. I'm also interested in a rewrite in Python, which will be easier to allow flexible configuration. (In reality I don't think I'll ever write one.) It'll be great if it's integrated to AutoKey, but the AutoKey developer is not interested.

To make these hacks more popular, you can upvote my answer here to a question on Emacs Pinky in StackOverflow.

Regards.

[teika]

At-home-modifier-2.7.3 is released. It merges the upstream 2.7.3, but has no changes in ahm itself since the last release, ahm-2.7.1.

Ebuilds:
* xf86-input-evdev-2.7.3-r1.ebuild
* xf86-input-evdev-2.7.3.ebuild

Both compiles from the same source code. The former uses the Xorg's + my patch, while the latter downloads all from my repo. Obviously the former is safer.

Regards.