> [Allanah Myles <dossy@panoptic.com> writes:]
>
> > Since even the standard PC keyboard has 102 keys (and some have a few
> > more), I'd venture to say that no one device will have more than
> > 255 (2^8) "keys" or identifiable inputs. For items with absolute
>
> but : there are more than that Key Variations. There are, on a typical
> Sun Sparc-5 keyboard, over 15 keys with no equivalent on a PC: Help, Cut,
> Copy, Paste, Find, Open/Close, Stop, Front, Undo, Again, Props,
> Speaker[+], Speaker[-], Speaker[On/Off], Suspend. Add up all such
> variations and you're over 128 alot, maybe over 256.
Easily. When working on a generic userspace keyboard library (which I
pretty much abandoned in its infancy), I ended up with something like
800 *special* keys (combining the lists from X11R6, ncurses, and the
Linux kbd package and making a few generalizations). Of course, many
of these might typically be generated by key combinations (if they can
be generated at all), but still... and of course adding the keys
corresponding to characters (which need not be ASCII on some
keyboards) would increase the number even more...
OTOH, I'm not sure any given keyboard will have all that many keys, so
if we go for some positional hardware-based scheme (with later mapping
as appropriate), we can probably get by with one byte.
-- Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC <amu@mit.edu> (finger amu@monk.mit.edu)- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu