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At present, each port of PuTTY has a separate keyboard handler, which takes keyboard events and converts them into bytes to be fed to the line discipline. This is clearly silly, since much of the code is shared, but a sensible abstraction is trickier than you might think. I (BJH) can think of the following kinds of keypress that PuTTY has to be able to handle. Further suggestions welcome. 1a: Typewriter keys, possibly affected by Caps Lock, Shift, Alt Gr, or Option. These emit graphic characters in the current character set. The graphic character in question should be whatever the user expects, which is usually determined by the OS. 1b: Typewriter keys with Control held down. For keys which would usually generate ASCII characters without Control, it's usually clear which control character they should generate. What about non-ASCII characters (or non-ASCII keyboards)? In the Mac OS, Command-key shortcuts are always based on a Roman keyboard layout. Should we do the same with Control? 1c: Typewriter keys handled through the "compose" mechanism. These have to be converted to characters as if Compose were not held down, and then composed through a fixed table. 2: Function keys, including Tab, Esc, Backspace, F1-F12 and editing keys, but not the numeric keypad. These emit escape sequences (sequences of _bytes_, not characters), with the precise sequence depending on terminal modes, configuration, keys held down etc. While complex, I think this is all entirely platform- and keyboard-layout independent, and hence not scary. 3a: The numeric keypad in application mode. In this mode, the keypad, including Num Lock, behaves as a set of function keys. 3b: The numeric keypad in normal mode, with Num Lock off. In this mode, those keypad keys which can also be editing keys generate the same sequences as the editing keys themselves. Other keys are, I think, processed as with Num Lock on below. 3c: The numeric keypad in normal mode, with Num Lock on. In this mode, the keypad behaves as typewriter keys. 3d: The numeric keypad with Alt held down. This accumulates a numeric character code (line charset) in decimal which is sent when Alt goes up. * All the above, with Meta held down. This should send the same sequence as without Meta down, but preceded by ESC. * Keys which cause PuTTY to do things but which aren't sent to the host. Some of these (e.g. Shift+Page Up) are platform-independent, and can be treated as function keys. Others (e.g. Alt+Space) are better handled in platform-dependent code. * Keys which should be handled by the OS. I don't think the platform- independent keyboard handler should see these at all. Now for some proposals: We define a list of modifiers, provisionally including: PKM_SHIFT PKM_CONTROL PKM_META PKM_ALT PKM_CAPSLOCK PKM_NUMLOCK Note that the Alt key (used for Alt+keypad) and the Meta key (used for Meta+typewriter) may or may not have distinct physical keys. The PI code should ignore Meta on the keypad and Alt everywhere else. [ But what if I want to type Meta+Alt+123 on a system with separate Alt and Meta keys? Is that so wrong? ] We define a list of keysyms for function keys, with a null keysym: PK_NULL PK_F1 PK_RETURN PK_UP PK_PF1 ... We define a function to be called by the platform keyboard handler when something happens: process_key(keysym, chars, modifiers) keysym can be PK_NULL if there's no keysym for the current key. chars (a UCS-2 string) can be empty if the platform doesn't have a translation for the current key. If both keysym is PK_NULL and chars is empty, the platform is just reporting a change of modifier state (for Alt+keypad). In the examples that follow, assume that what look like C strings are really UCS-2. Now for the specifics: Case 1a is easy: process_key(PK_NULL, "A", PKM_SHIFT); NB that all modifiers are reported, but SHIFT and CAPSLOCK are assumed to have been dealt with already. Case 1b is interesting. On some platforms, the native keyboard handler understands Control, so we can do: process_key(PK_NULL, "\001", PKM_CONTROL); On the other hand, we might find that we need some extra ones, so process_key would have to handle: process_key(PK_NULL, "`", PKM_CONTROL); I can't see any obvious problem with allowing both. Case 1c is a combination of 2 and 1a: process_key(PK_COMPOSE, "", 0); process_key(PK_NULL, "e", 0); process_key(PK_NULL, "'", 0); Composition can then be handled in the PI code. Case 2 is trivial: process_key(PK_F1, "", 0); process_key(PK_TAB, "", PK_SHIFT); Case 3a-3d are mostly identical in the platform code: process_key(PK_PF2, "/", 0); process_key(PK_KPDECIMAL, ",", PKM_NUMLOCK); /* German kbd */ But Num Lock is a pain -- I think I'd habe the platform code check the application-keypad state and damn the layering violation: process_key(PK_NULL, "", PKM_NUMLOCK); process_key(PK_PF1, "", 0); If the Meta key is down, the platform code is expected to subtract it out of the characters sent if it did anything: process_key(PK_NULL, "a", PKM_META); (Update: this idea appeared in the code in the form of term_key() in terminal.c in r2728; however it was never adopted in any of the mainstream ports, so was finally removed again in r9579.)