# 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. :)

HTML Conversion by AG2HTML.pl V2.941126c, perl 5.00404 & witbrock@cs.cmu.edu