- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I don’t understand why they mention programmable keyboards there. Buying a programmable keyboard to be able to rebind your keys is silly when it can be made entirely through software. On X11 for example you can load a .Xkeymap file and set your keyboard mappings this way. I use this to have a modified dvorak keymap with Altgr+auoeidhtns giving [(] on the home row for instance, very convenient. Then I use my window manager i3 to rebind mod+p to send Ctrl+V using xdotool (because mod+p seems more vim-like) and I’ve set my terminal urxvt to treat Ctrl+V as paste. if all software supported the Sun copy paste keys then I could send those keys instead of Ctrl+V.
I was just complaining about something like this just the other day.
edit: hold on, they want me to have dedicated keyboard keys for copy and pasta? No. I am not accepting that as a solution.
I got bored after reading 95%, including the end, and it does not mention what the “new” keyboard shortcut is.
I also miss the point why you bring up external programmable keyboards and not mentioning alternative layouts like neo.
It doesn’t open with a summary or overview but dives right in to exploration, but I think the point comes across:
The copy and paste key codes, which have no physical keys anymore, are - to a degree - supported in software. Their claim is that those key codes are the tool for universal copy and paste, and then it’s the input interpretations job (key and combination mapping) to offer bindings to those key codes.
GTK added support the copy and paste keyboards in January 2025. QT also added support for copy and paste key codes the same month. I’m not sure of the first released version of the GTK toolkit that will contain the fix. For QT, it will be QT 6.10, scheduled for release in September 2025. Together, this will cover many apps built for Gnome and KDE as well as others that use the same toolkits.
… followed by some more “current state of support for those key codes”.
Did you (or I?) miss something here? In the 3rd paragraph it’s “revealed”:
In a story of “what’s old is new again”, the solution dates back to ancient keyboards with physical keys for Copy and Paste.
Neo seems like a cool layout, reminds me of “unexpected keyboard” for android, but I fail to see the relevance since it doesn’t have the copy/paste buttons (like the keyboard in the picture in the article) as far as I can see
Buying a new keyboard with an unusual key (combination) is not the solution to a universal copy paste shortcut. I didn’t get why you’d write about adding a new universal shortcut by buying a new external keyboard that you can customize when you can customize what you already have. Yes, customizing the external keyboard is different but it is far far away from becoming universal.