Re: KDGKBENT

Aaron Ucko (UCKO@vax1.rockhurst.edu)
Mon, 15 Apr 1996 18:52:28 -0600 (CST)

> Yes, I understand all that. What does this have to do with having to
> set the mode to VC_UNICODE just to read a complete keymap?
> ...
> X in particular supports non-ISO-8859-1 characters anyway
> (albeit not via Unicode).
>
>I do not understand what you can have in mind.
>The keyboard driver knows nothing about ISO-8859-1.
>Many people are using it with ISO-8859-2, for example, but
>also much more exotic character sets are in use.
>
>The distinction is not ISO-8859-1 versus non-ISO-8859-1, but
>single-byte versus UTF-8.

UTF-8 has nothing to do with my situation.

>Maybe you can clarify what you want to do, and why the current setup
>is unfortunate for your purposes?

OK, sorry. I'm writing a universal keyboard library, which will sit on top
of the linux console, X, or some random terminal and tell the program very
specifically what key was pressed (vaguely like X's interface, but structured
for more versatility.) It natively supports all of ISO-10646 (even portions
outside the BMP), so I would like to be able to read a full keymap from
the kernel and then switch into VC_MEDIUMRAW mode to use it as well as
possible. Of course I can go into VC_UNICODE mode to read the keymap, but
that strikes me as a silly requirement. The keyboard map doesn't depend
on the mode, so why should the version of it exported to userspace via
the GD[GS]KBENT ioctls?
>
>Andries

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