xkbd status?

Hello GPE,

      Now that I have base system building for me, I started to look
at the codebase to implement soem actual improvements. One thing which
immediately caught my attention is that both GPE and Opie lack
onscreen keyboard gesture/slides support to input frequent keys more
easily.

      I was pretty surprised taht xkbd already support this feature,
allowing to define 4 "slide" actions for each keys. Other things I saw
were not so joyful:

1. Keyboard layouts which come with xkbd don't actually have slides
defined.
2. There are only english layouts in xkbd tarball/repo, that's the
only ones that appear to get into OE distros. There're some
contributed layouts at http://handhelds.org/~mallum/xkbd/ , but I
don't see OE package for them.
3. The original author appears to no longer maintain xkbd.
4. It doesn't support loading switching among several layouts (a must
feature for proper i18n/l91n in places of the world).

      So, I wonder what's the state of xkbd, who maintain it now, and
how to proceed with improving situation with it. At least following
can be done easily:

1. Add contributed layouts to OE xkbd package (or create separate
package(s)).
2. Add slide definitions to them.

  As of slides, these are simple gestures, when you tap a key, but
move status up/down/left/right without lifting it. Following slide map
appears to give good improvemnt in usability of onscreen keyboard:

1. Up - equivalent to pressing a key with shift, i.e. input capital or
punctuation.
2. Left - regardless of location, a backspace. This way, you don't
need to aim into a small screen area to perform this rather common
operation.
3. Right - regardless of poistion, Space.
4. Down - regardless of poistion, Enter.


What do you think?

-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                          mailto:[email protected]