As many keyboards have multimedia keys (volume, play, pause…) I think we should map them to standard just like B_ENTER, B_SPACE and so on.
If we do that all interested apps can take advantage of these keys without special handling for every keyboard. Note that the acual keycodes may be different but the key reported (B_PLAY or such) should be reported the same.
As many keyboards have multimedia keys (volume, play, pause..) I think we should map them to standard just like B_ENTER, B_SPACE and so on.
But what’ll we name them? :?
I’ve got 19 extra buttons on this kb, a scroll wheel & a volume nob too :-/
Should they be like B_EMAIL_KEY / B_MEDIA_KEY … B_SHOPPING (yeah, they’re stoopid)
or maybe B_USER_1 etc…
Some newer mice have been gaining buttons too, latest i’ve seen with 9 buttons, and a double-tilt wheel… how can we keep up !
Just a side-note, one of the keys is a toggle for the function keys, i’m not sure if it reports a key-press (xev doesnt tell me anything…), but it does give me yet another 12 keys to play with :twisted:
Maybe just those that are quite common should be mapped. Like Mute, unmute, play,pause, skip forward/backward and pause.
While the initial concept is a good one, I can’t help but wonder if the complexity of handling all of them would result in some serious bloat. For example, I’ve seen HP keyboards with a reference to Quicken and also the HP website along with the de-facto standard CD-type buttons (play,stop, etc).
I’ve thought about what to do with all of this and I don’t really think that there really needs to be anything quite like this at the OS level - it can be easily handled with an app designed to work with it. I don’t know if you are aware of the tweaks needed to get them going under R5/Zeta, but it more or less amounts to adding some entries to a settings file which defines the keymap and then using SpicyKeys to map them to whatever it is you want to do. This kind of job would be another excellent niche app to make general life in BeOS just a little bit nicer - handling the settings and then making an easy way to map them to different functions.
Yes the problem is that nobody maps them the same, so if you’d want to do an app say a ‘VolumeControl’ it can never handle that without you having to configure the keys in the app. Also if you move your harddrive to another computer the keys might not be the same.
You don’t have to handle all the extra keys, just the ones that are quite common (and useful).