Re: Freeze break request - gnome-settings-daemon - bug 681685

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 1:21 PM, Rui Tiago Cação Matos
<tiagomatos gmail com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> with the transition to the unified input sources design we lost the
> ability to use the XKB option that would configure a shortcut inside
> the X server itself to switch between keyboard layouts.
>
> This is a regression that can't be 100% fixed with the current
> architecture where it's gnome-settings-daemon doing the shortcut keys
> grabbing and the fact that those traditional shortcuts consisted of
> modifier only keys like Alt+Shift.
>
> Yet, we can partially fix it with some clever key grabbing like the
> current locate pointer feature does. So I basically re-used the locate
> pointer code to implement something that works relatively well except
> that it doesn't have all the options that the traditional XKB option
> had (although I'm adding some more right now) but I think it has the
> most important ones. It also doesn't work in the shell overview but
> that's part of the architectural problem I mentioned before (see bug
> 643111).
>
> Anyway the patches are at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681685 .
>
> I tried to make it so that this doesn't have much impact on the main
> gnome-settings-daemon itself by doing the actual work in a separate
> process (again just like locate-pointer) and this will have to be
> turned on explicitly by the user in gsettings (or on g-t-t once I get
> to it) so I believe it is safe to break the code freeze for this.
>

I've tested this now, and I guess it works as well as can be expected
from this kind of approach.

What takes a little getting used to is that one has to release the
keys in the right order. E.g. with the setting 'alt-shift-l', I have
to generate the sequence press Alt - press Shift - release Shift -
release Alt. If I just hit the keys together quickly, I often end up
generating an order where I release Alt before Shift, in which case we
get a key release event for the Shift key without the Alt modifier,
thus not triggering the switch. Can we grab these combinations both
ways, ie look for an Alt release with the Shift modifier as well ? I
think that would make this much less frustrating.

It doesn't seem to work in the overview though. Wasn't that supposed
to be the advantage of this approach over ISO_Next_Source ?

I'm tentatively in favour of merging this, lets just spend a few more
cycles getting the most out of it.