Re: Japanese Keyboard Layout in Console

[Magnus Eriksson <magetoo%fastmail.fm@localhost>]

I don't see that anyone else has replied yet, so I'll give it a try.  I'm 
no expert on this whole mess that is keyboard handling in Unix though.


On Wed, 2 Dec 2009, Hou, Ruoyu wrote:

> In X window, nearly every output perfectly fits the keysyms except one key: 
> <^/'upper dash'>. the shifted one ("upper dash") is output as tilde.

This is an ASCII/JIS thing, like the backslash/yen confusion.  As I 
understand it, on ancient JIS the key would have sent ASCII tilde (overbar 
for JIS), and shift-0 would have sent nothing at all -- although that is 
just theoretical knowledge on my part.

Now, on PC keyboards we have moved things around so we can have separate 
backslash and yen keys, overbar on its own key, and a tilde on 0.  But at 
least my X keymap definitions does not use this for anything useful, and 
gives duplicates instead.  I suspect yours are the same and that's why you 
get a tilde here.


> In console, however, <backspace> and <delete> act the same.

I googled a bit and found an old thread on the topic:

http://archive.netbsd.se/?ml=netbsd-help&a=2007-05&t=3993639


But you might not want to read it.  If you do, and do not come away 
thinking you should just wipe the drive and install Windows instead[*], 
you are a stronger person than me.  This mail gives some interesting 
advice though:

http://archive.netbsd.se/?ml=netbsd-help&a=2007-05&m=4016399

(The advice is to remap the key labeled "delete" to send "Keypad Delete" 
instead.  It seems like it could possibly work at least in editors, plus 
it avoids the whole One True Delete Key mess.)


> <Home> <End> <'upper dash'> all produce tilde while the actual <0/~> 
> echoes only 0 but no tilde whether shifted or not.

Home / End probably produce ESC [ 7 ~ and ESC [ 8 ~.  That will do nothing 
if things aren't set up right, but it will leave a tilde behind.  '0' has 
no shifted meaning in the console's "jp" keymap (I guess this is following 
JIS), so that just gives you a zero.


> Moreover, while I can use <Ctrl>-<Alt>-<Fx> to switch ttys, emacs in 
> console mode failed to recognize <Alt> as Meta key so I was obliged to 
> use <Esc> as Meta.

Fortunately, this is something I have never had to learn.  :-)

But there is a "metaesc" option that could possibly be what you want. 
You could try setting the encoding to jp.metaesc (wsconsctl -w 
encoding=...) and see what happens.


Hope there is something there that might help.  I'd like to repeat that 
I'm by no means an expert, and mostly I just get angry whenever I try to 
understand this.


[*] And who doesn't?


MAgnus