Subject: Wskeyboard mappings
To: None <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: Reinoud Zandijk <imago@kabel065011.kabel.utwente.nl>
List: tech-kern
Date: 03/14/2001 18:19:30
Dear all,

in my effords to port the arm32's RiscPC port to use wscons, I came on a
few ``hairy'' parts of wskbd ... or rather kind of bolted things.

Since my keyboad is a PS/2 one and having a slightly different layout from
the std. UK keyboard, I decided to make my own keymap. This worked fine
but i noticed a few oddities :

	- It doenst seem to be posible to place the mathimatical `not' on
the key next to the `1' together with the agauche (spelling?) and the bar.

	- I noticed that the wskbd driver just assumes every keyboard to
return XT keycodes in its maps !

	- Some characters like o^, a" etc seem bolted somewhere in a table
instead of the keyboard mapping tables.



Therefore i would like to suggest the following :

	1) Rewite the maps so they use AT keyboard codes or some other
keyboard standard... maybe unicode even with a second mapping keyboard
codes->unicode key characters ?

	2) Extend the keyboard mapping in a way to include all keyboard
``weed'' apart from the obvious `Compose' and toupper() functionality. In
this way the a^, a`, a' as well as the `not' can be placed at arbitrary
positions on the keyboard.

The reasons for me to make a fuzz of it is that the current tables seem to
have both a translation role (keyboard codes->key codes) as well as its
behaviour (i.e. shift 4 is $)

Any ideas about this ?

Cheers,
Reinoud