Everything you want to know is documented here http://isqueak.org/ioGetNextEvent
but I might have missed something or things have changed since last fall
On Tuesday, June 23, 2009, Michael van der Gulik mikevdg@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all.
I'm writing my own EventSensor class (as part of Subcanvas: http://gulik.pbwiki.com/Canvas) and I'm looking at what the VM is doing.
When I press and release key under a recent Linux VM, I get three events:
#(2 512613 53 1 8 0 0 0) #(2 512613 53 0 8 0 0 0) #(2 512664 53 2 8 0 0 0) The fields are (for those that don't already know this):
1: type (2=keyboard), 2: timestamp, 3: character in Mac Roman encoding, 4: key press/release (0=character, 1=press, 2=release) 5: modifiers (1=shift, 2=ctrl, 4=mac option, 8=cmd/alt)
and the rest of the fields are unused afaict.
Now, why do I get both a key pressed event and a character event? The key pressed event already has the character information. Is there a circumstance where these two events would differ in anything other than the type of event?
The VM doesn't send any events for only a shift/ctrl/alt key press or release. Should it?
If you hold down a key, you get a stream of key press and character events for the same key. Should it? I'd prefer to have character repetition handled within the image so that arcade games could be implemented.
Finally, I'm lazy, so I'm going to ask this mailing list how Unicode input has been handled rather than read code. Do implementations modify the VM to send Unicode characters through as field 3 (or whatever) of the input arrays? Or do the implementations take the Mac Roman encoding from the event array, look up a keyboard mapping in the image and convert the result to the correct Unicode character?
Gulik.