keyboard remapping: help!

[mouse at mcgill-vision.UUCP]

In article <1636 at oddjob.UChicago.EDU>, mcb at oddjob.UChicago.EDU (Matt Bamberger) writes:
> Does anyone know of a good way to remap a terminal (sun especially)
> to the Dvorak layout?  The idea is simple: all you have to do is
> replace all b's with x's, and so on.  The problem I'm having is that
> some programs seem to take input directly from the terminal (so I
> can't pipe stdin to them through a filter).

The idea is simple, but the implementation usually is not.  This can't
be done with a normal terminal, because (for example) control-comma and
control-period can't be distinguished, so you can't put letters on
those keys.  About all you can do is rearrange the letters.  It is
fairly easy to put code in the terminal driver to accomplish this.

If you are lucky enough to be on a machine with a completely soft
keyboard like a Sun or a Lisp Machine then this becomes possible.  You
have to write something that tells the kernel to give it raw up/down
keycodes and does its own keyboard interpretation and feeds it to your
program (shell, whatever) through a pseudo tty.  This is relatively
easy; I have a program which does this (among other things) on the Sun.

There are problems though.

One is Sun-specific:  such a program doesn't get along with suntools,
since suntools thinks it owns the keyboard.  I look upon this as yet
another reason not to run suntools.

The other is general:  you'd better know the new layout better than the
old, unless you rearrange the keycaps.  I know; there was a time when I
did rearrange my keyboard in an effort to teach myself a more efficient
layout.  Couldn't do it, even with the help of a little cheat sheet
showing the new layout sitting right by the keyboard.  I don't know how
easy it would be if the keycaps matched (no opportunity to try it).
What I'd like to see would be a terminal with little (say) 10x20 arrays
of LEDs (or LCDs) instead of symbols on the keycaps.  These would then
of course be programmable.  (I know, it'd be a mess to connect the
keycaps to the electronics - but it *would* be nice, wouldn't it?)

					der Mouse

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