[Lazarus] LCL and custom keyboard layouts

Hans-Peter Diettrich DrDiettrich1 at aol.com
Sat Jan 28 16:27:22 CET 2012


Mark Morgan Lloyd schrieb:
> Over the last few weeks I've hacked together a partial APL 
> implementation, for use as a way of specifying lists of numbers etc. 
> when passing commands between computers implementing a large distributed 
> system. For test purposes I've compiled it on Linux as a command-line 
> app and am using FPC's keyboard unit to implement a layout similar to 
> http://www.aplusdev.org/keyboard.html, with Alt as meta and Esc to go 
> into composition mode (use cursor keys to move between the glyphs on 
> each key). Internal storage is in widestrings, external files etc. UTF-8.
> 
> I now want to move the parser and evaluator into an LCL-based app, which 
> will ideally allow at least partial editing of APL-style expressions 
> rather than reading everything from configuration files.
> 
> What is the situation with LCL editing components, Synedit, Cmdline and 
> so on? Is there a single underlying keyboard component, or at least a 
> uniform interface?
> 
> In short, where do I start? :-)

On Windows you'd write an IME (Input Method Editor), that allows to 
compose strings from keystrokes. Don't beat me - I only know that 
something like that exists ;-)

The display should not be a problem. AFAIR is the APL charset part of 
Unicode, so that you can use SynEdit. Write an APL syntax highlighter 
for it, if you like.

Commandlines? Perhaps using the IME, provided that you can tell the 
console to use it ;-)

DoDi





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