Re: thoughts on interaction of key bindings and input methods (was Re: wish: right alt/meta to switch keyboard layout while pressed)

[Ben Wing]

Paul Pogonyshev wrote:

> Ben Wing wrote:
>  
>
> > now, from personal experience: i have had many times when i've been in 
> > foreign countries and had to log on to the internet.  typically, the 
> > punctuation is in a completely different place.  i always switched to us 
> > layout, and found it nearly impossible to use any other layouts.  i 
> > *definitely* would expect in such a case that keyboard shortcuts 
> > involving punctuation should follow the logical, not physical, layout -- 
> > but with the physical layout as a backup, so when i temporarily switch 
> > to russian, i can still type C-x. (with alphabetic keys, it is 
> > semi-feasible to search the keyboard in front of me to find the keys, 
> > but this is just impossible for punctuation.)
> >    
>
> I fail to see while it is impossible for punctuation

my experience was being in, e.g., thailand or morocco and trying to type 
url's and passwords and such with punctuation in them.  places like this 
often type latin characters using the british or french or some other 
european layout.  the location of the punctuation was completely random 
(from my perspective).  characters like '@' can often be typed only 
using an AltGr combination.  the keyboards often had multiple 
punctuation labels on each key, in different colors, corresponding to 
the different layouts that were most common.  all of this made it just 
impossible to locate punctuation using an unfamiliar layout.

it seems that we want to have some notion of "default" layout.  in my 
case, i want the default layout to be us, no matter what the physical 
layout, but in your case you don't want things changing just because you 
temporarily switched the layout to russian.  but i don't know if there 
is an easy solution for both cases.

ben