International keyboard support?

jos...@lisp.de

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Dec 27, 2020, 11:59:56 AM12/27/20

to Medley Interlisp

Maiko/Medley on an Intel iMac with German keyboard.

Has anybody used it with an international keyboard? I tried to use the 'virtual keyboards' feature by switching there to German. But that wasn't really successful...

Ideas/hints?

Nick Briggs

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Dec 27, 2020, 1:15:53 PM12/27/20

to jos...@lisp.de, Medley Interlisp

There is/was support for a "Euro keyboard" when it was dealing with a direct-connect Sun keyboard, but otherwise it's working on what X11 presents for the key codes.

Could you describe the problem you are seeing?

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Ron Kaplan

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Dec 27, 2020, 2:41:35 PM12/27/20

to jos...@lisp.de, Medley Interlisp

Virtualkeyboards is probably overkill for what you want to do, and it may not be properly coordinated with the codes that X11 transmits for the various keys. There may be other parameters at the X11 level that lets you get what you want, I don’t know about that. But here is a lightweight within-medley strategy...

You should be able to set up the desired mapping with a sequence of calls to KEYACTION, say, in your site or personal greeting file. This would tell medley what Xerox character-codes to transmit for the key-codes that X11 provides for the various physical keys.

The function WHICHKEY in the little attached file can be used to tell you the names that medley can use to identify a particular physical key. Execute (WHICHKEY), hold down a physical key, and it will tell you the various synonym-names that it has for that key, which you can use with KEYACTION to assign the behavior that you want.

WHICHKEY

jos...@lisp.de

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Dec 27, 2020, 4:02:02 PM12/27/20

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bash-3.2$ setxkbmap -print

xkb_keymap {

xkb_keycodes { include "empty+aliases(qwerty)" };

xkb_types { include "complete" };

xkb_compat { include "complete" };

xkb_symbols { include "empty(basic)" };

xkb_geometry { include "pc(pc104)" };

};

I've started medley via an xterm, XQuartz is set to use the keyboard mapping of the system, which is German.

In the xterm the usual keys for # + - . and so on are working. shifted keys work, too. Example: shift-8 is ( -> this is the correct German mapping. So the xterm basically has the correct German keyboard mapping.

Inside Medley shift-8 is *, a..z work, shift-a .. shift-z works too. y and z are correct. but all the other characters are from a US mapping.

Nick Briggs

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Dec 27, 2020, 4:14:57 PM12/27/20

to jos...@lisp.de, Medley Interlisp

On Dec 27, 2020, at 1:02 PM, jos...@lisp.de <jos...@lisp.de> wrote:

bash-3.2$ setxkbmap -print
xkb_keymap {
xkb_keycodes { include "empty+aliases(qwerty)" };

-- That's odd, I would have expected "aliases(qwertz)" here, but perhaps it's counting on the changed mapping being done outside of X and so that doesn't show up here.

xkb_types { include "complete" };
xkb_compat { include "complete" };
xkb_symbols { include "empty(basic)" };
xkb_geometry { include "pc(pc104)" };
};

I've started medley via an xterm, XQuartz is set to use the keyboard mapping of the system, which is German.

You should get the same behavior whether it's started from a Terminal window or an xterm.

Do you mean "defaults write org.macosforge.xquartz.X11 sync_keymap -boolean true" ?

In the xterm the usual keys for # + - . and so on are working. shifted keys work, too. Example: shift-8 is ( -> this is the correct German mapping. So the xterm basically has the correct German keyboard mapping.

Inside Medley shift-8 is *, a..z work, shift-a .. shift-z works too. y and z are correct. but all the other characters are from a US mapping.

Given that a-z are giving the right codes, including y and z, I suspect that Ron's suggestion about doing a Lisp level reassignment of the incorrect keyactions is going to be the easiest path to success, but I'd still like to understand a bit more about why things are going wrong.

nicholas...@gmail.com schrieb am Sonntag, 27. Dezember 2020 um 19:15:53 UTC+1:
There is/was support for a "Euro keyboard" when it was dealing with a direct-connect Sun keyboard, but otherwise it's working on what X11 presents for the key codes.

Could you describe the problem you are seeing?

On Dec 27, 2020, at 8:59 AM, jos...@lisp.de <jos...@lisp.de> wrote:

Maiko/Medley on an Intel iMac with German keyboard.

Has anybody used it with an international keyboard? I tried to use the 'virtual keyboards' feature by switching there to German. But that wasn't really successful...

Ideas/hints?

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Larry Masinter

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Dec 27, 2020, 4:51:29 PM12/27/20

to Nick Briggs, jos...@lisp.de, Medley Interlisp

Since XQuartz per se isn’t doing any fixes, I wonder if we should point people at www.x.org instead?

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Rainer Joswig

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Jan 31, 2021, 2:00:23 PM1/31/21

to Larry Masinter, Nick Briggs, Medley Interlisp

Just in case this has not been seen.

FYI: there is a new version of XQuartz, also native for M1 Macs.

https://www.mail-archive.com/xquar...@lists.macosforge.org/msg01027.html

Regards,

Rainer Joswig

Nick Briggs

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Jan 31, 2021, 2:49:53 PM1/31/21

to Rainer Joswig, Larry Masinter, Medley Interlisp

Thanks. I saw that, and attempted to do the update, but it failed in the extraction phase. No idea what the problem is.

-- Nick

Rainer Joswig

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Jan 31, 2021, 2:57:20 PM1/31/21

to Nick Briggs, Larry Masinter, Medley Interlisp

maybe just try again.

I can run it on the latest macOS 11.2. beta.

Regards

Rainer Joswig

Nick Briggs

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Jan 31, 2021, 3:12:23 PM1/31/21

to Rainer Joswig, Larry Masinter, Medley Interlisp

I tried twice -- currently, attempting to open it (on 10.11.6) results in "Image: XQuartz-2.8.0_beta.dmg no mountable file systems" (it can get through "verifying", "attaching" and then coughs up the error).

-- Nick

Nick Briggs

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Jan 31, 2021, 4:50:57 PM1/31/21

to Medley Interlisp, Larry Masinter, Rainer Joswig

Turns out that's (currently) an APFS file system in the disk image, so if you're running anything older than Mojave you're out of luck. Also, it's set up so that you can't extract the .pkg file from the disk on a newer system and use it on an older one.

Perhaps the packager will rebuild it as an HFS+ image.

-- Nick

On Jan 31, 2021, at 11:00 AM, Rainer Joswig <jos...@lisp.de> wrote:

Larry Masinter

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May 21, 2021, 12:05:51 AM5/21/21

to Rainer Joswig, Nick Briggs, Medley Interlisp, Guenther Goerz, Interlisp core

I think this belongs in some kind of FAQ. I’m not sure I know the answer.

I suppose I’d put it in the wiki on how to run on a mac, with what OS and keyboard.

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Rainer Joswig

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May 25, 2021, 12:40:59 PM5/25/21

to Guenther Goerz, Larry Masinter, Nick Briggs, Medley Interlisp, Interlisp core

Hi Guenther,

btw, hello from Hamburg, I was a computer science student when you were Prof in Hamburg. :-)

Unfortunately I know next to nothing about how Medley works. So I would be of no help.

I use currently another macOS Lispm emulator, which uses the latest Xquartz as the X11 server and which successfully deals with a German keyboard.

It uses a special keyboard mapping and one can use the "dead" keys like ^, ´, `.

Another way one might also want explore is to use a keyboard mapping software on the Mac side. In the past I used 'Keyboard Maestro' for that in some applications.

Regards

Rainer

Am 25.05.2021 um 18:00 schrieb Guenther Goerz <guenthe...@fau.de>:

Dear all,

coming back to Rainer Joswig's remark that Medley runs on Mac OS 11, let me add that although I am still using Mac OS 10.13, I installed the latest update of XQuartz - which shows an incompatible behavior: All the keys I annotated with "null" in my first mail are simply non-existent, i.e. there is no reaction whatsoever in the terminal. Therefore, Ron's suggestion to fix the problem *in* Medley can't work, because those keys don't send any code. As already mentioned, this behavior is different from that of all other applications I tried. So, I think XQuartz ignores the MAc OS keyboard mapping, at least for Umlauts and alt-keys, and that seems to be independent of the Mac OS version.

Best wishes,
-- Guenther

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