Extended keyboard

[rk...@uno.edu]

Does anyone know how to tell (inside a program) if the user is hitting the
arrow keys on the Sun Workstation (OS 4.1.3)? Also, what about the number
pad? In Matlab, there seems to be a difference between the number pad and
the numbers at the top of the keyboard, even if numlock is on. We do have
a program that acts like kbhit in DOS; that one does recognize the number
pad when numlock is on. Also, how do we recognize the function keys at the
very top of the keyboard?

[James Vlcek]

How are you reading these keys, eg, (a) directly from the console (no
X), (b) through an xterm window, or are you (c) writing an X program
that deals with the actual X events?

If (a), I don't know what to tell you...

If (b), then:
od -c
and then type in all the keys you're interested in. You may want to
do them one at a time, to avoid confusion over where one key ends
and another leaves off. Some keys may not generate any input; do a
`man xterm' to find out how to set up translations for those keys
in your .Xresources file.

If (c), then:
Check out XLookupKeysym() and XLookupString(); which turn XKeyEvents
into keysyms or strings. Keysyms will tell you a sort-of hardware-
independent version of `what key you pressed' (as opposed to
keycodes, which tell you exactly which key was pressed but in a
necessarily hardware-independent way), while the strings returned
by XLookupString will give you a textual (ASCII) representation
of the key pressed (which may be more than one byte in length).

Jim Vlcek
vl...@epimbe.com