Linux/Unix status


The biggest problem with the unix-version was to find
an easy, fast, functional and stable GUI platform that have good keyboard
support. Infact, such a thing I don't think exist.
The alternatives I ended up concidering was GTK,
vxwindows, pure X11 and Qt. Pure X11 has good keyboard-
suport, but is to advanced, which will garantiued lead
to problems, and to much time used programming low-level things.
I ended up starting using Qt, basicly because it
seemed to be the fastest, most stable, and best looking, allthough GTK
had a bit better keyboard-support (at least differenciate between
left and right control key).

I started up writing the basic graphics-wrap functions,
a very limited keyboard-support, and full mouse-support,
in the spring 2001. And thats about all that has been done
since then. It still lacks some kind of instrument object,
very few keyboard events are supported, no loading or
saving, no configuration, and no input requesters. But it compiles fine, and
you can edit with some of the keys, and all the mouse-
functions are supoorted.

Qts terrible lack of keyboard-support is the main problem
for further development. These are all the keyboard-qualifiers
Qt supports: Caps-lock, one shift, one ctrl, and some kind of limited
alt/meta things. _Thats too little to make an efficient
program_. The modern pc-keyboard have no less than 10 different
qualifier-keys, why does Qt (and wxwindows) only support about 3.5 then?
So in my opinion, Trolltech obvious make their
Qt kit mainly suited for toyprograms (ehem). But after looking
a bit further, I see that its possible to use other keys
than the traditional qualifier-keys, as replacement for qualifier-keys.
This can be done by using up and down keyboard-events and filter
away autorepeat keyboard events. To for example use
the key to the right for the left shift as the EXTRA_LEFT
key, use the "." key as the EXTRA_RIGHT key, and the key
to the left for the right shift as the SHIFT_RIGHT key.
So now, when I discovered this possibility, I have a bit more
motivation to try making a usable unix-version. :)


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