Terminal for ASU

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:54:49 -0700 Ken Restivo <ken at restivo.org> babbled:

> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 11:16:22PM +1000, Carsten Haitzler wrote:
> > 
> > > IMO it's crazy for you (the senior developer to ASU? you're surely  
> > > the most active?) to have his hands tied by these shadowy "designers"  
> > > who can interfere apparently on a whim. Especially when they're  
> > > coming up with crazy decisions that are technically poor!!
> > 
> > welcome to openmoko. i get paid to program. i am not a designer (as i have
> > been told) and thus am not qualified to make decisions there (so i have been
> > informed). i am paid to program. so that is what i will do.
> >
> 
> If you've been mismanaged/micromanaged so badly that you've had to adopt what
> Neitzche called the "Sklavmoral"-- or  "I'm not paid to think, I'm only paid
> to wash the floors"-- attitude in order to survive, it doesn't bode well for
> OpenMoko.
> 
> In any case, you're doing great work, so "illigitimum non carborundum".  I
> can't tell you how delighted I was when I saw the "qwerty" button suddenly
> appear after doing an opkg upgrade! And the ability to choose different
> keyboard layouts from a pop-up menu was great. I thought to myself, "now THIS
> is a well-managed project, critical features that I need are being added
> without even asking for them, and the progress is daily!". And now of course
> it is gone.

sorry to give false hope - that was just me... doing things... things slipped
through - i enable the button so i can do debugging and play with the keyboard
without having to go run or write special apps (i also have a special app to
test auto-keyboard hint properties too - but that's another matter). :) i
actually don't really intend for a lot of he current ugly guts of kbd changes
to be seen as well - it's all a work in progress, but the illume keyboard now
has everything except:

1. actual dictionary lookup + correction. (got the infra - just missing the
dict bit).
2. the ability to either enable or disable it and optionally run another
keyboard app (illume's keyboard won't always be what you want. it's really
meant to be the no-frills "really efficient" keyboard that comes for free (so to
speak) with your desktop env at very little overhead). it likely will never do
handwriting recognition or try emulate dasher... or many things, but for a
basic nuts and bolts inputs mechanism that is easily extended by users with new
layouts and gets the job done, its here and comes for "free" (as such if the
keyboard is never shown the code is never paged in and it uses no memory
resources. even if used - code is dynamically paged, so its paged out again when
not used).

> Can someone please document what hack is necessary to add that button back
> in? And, yes, if anyone wants to please fork the necessary package, I will
> subscribe to that feed instead, because the ability to use an on-screen
> keyboard on a Linux phone is a must-have for me. The Illume keyboard with
> Full-QWERTY is excellent and I love it. I need to be able to launch it
> manually in order to use it with Minimo and openmoko-terminal2-- the two apps
> I purchased the phone to use.

unfortunately you're out of luck. people who pay me want qtopia's keyboard -
and so they shall get it. illume's internal keyboard is/will be disabled. i
haven't had time to make any way to enable illume's internal one by config yet.

> If some more "elegant" method is designed later on, and works, I'll switch to
> it. But for now I need a working keyboard in the terminal, and web browser,
> and all the other apps.
> 
> I'm sure all this will get sorted out eventually, and rough going like this
> is normal in the early days, so no big deal.

edje_decc (from edj-utils) the illume.edj file (enligtenment theme installed
in /usr/share/enlightenment/data/themes). in the directory find the .edc file -
edit. search for a comment string "don't look at me".  here are 3 of them.
notice the line above i the same entry - just commented out with a different
value. comment out the line with the "don't look at me" comment and UNCOMMENT
the line above. you'll get a keyboard button. rebuild the file (build.sh or
edje_cc file.edc) and copy the .edj file back on top of the original... restart
E (killall -HUP enlightenment will do the job - along with a dozen other
mechanisms... all but 1 disabled). :)

-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>