[libxkbcommon] Pull request - many changes

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 17 March 2012 16:24,  <wettstein509 at solnet.ch> wrote:
>> At the moment it just means they won't work in Wayland, but support
>> might (might) be removed from the X server at some stage too.  Is
>> there any reason you can't just use a locked group or level rather
>> than an overlay?
>
> I currently use overlays to have five layouts in my keymap, which is not
> possible with using groups alone.  Admittedly, this is more for fun than
> really useful, but I have seen that some people require more than the
> four groups that XKB supports.  Overlays allow to work around this
> restriction.

Ah.  Well, the plan is to extend libxkbcommon to allow more than four
groups - this is already mostly done.  XI2 already supports higher
groups, so the bulk of the work would be in fixing the XKB wire
protocol.

> Another use of overlays you will see when you try to put control keysyms
> or keypad keysyms (such as Next and KP_Add) on a higher level of a
> "usual" key (see, for example, de(neo) in xkeyboard-config).  This
> creates trouble with various applications (for example, Xt applications
> such as xterm).  If one uses overlays instead of levels, these problems
> can be worked around.  Redirect actions are an even more powerful
> alternative, but they are harder to use.

Interesting - which problems does this cause exactly?

Cheers,
Daniel