Any Keyhelper Wizards Out There?

[RobbH]

I've searched the forums, I've read the how-to doc, and I've tried to make sense of online Japanese-English translations of the author's site and a detailed tutorial.  I'm still lost!  If anyone can offer any guidance with Keyhelper, it would be appreciated.

A relatively simple question first.  The specifications for the "modifiers" section of the keyhelper.xml fille include a "release key" tag.  What is this?  Do these keys generate a keyup code that's different from the keydown code?  Or am I overlooking some other, obvious meaning?

Now for my tough question: does Keyhelper have the capability to respond to a sequence of keypresses by sending a different sequence of codes to the target application?  In case that's as unclear as I think it is, I'll try to explain.

What I have in mind is some form of intelligent capitalization.  Enter a space followed by a doublet of a given letter, and the result would be a space followed by a single instance of the same letter in upper case.  (It is possible to do this with the Custom Input applet, fwiw.)  Period-space-letter would yield period-space-capitol letter.  Return-letter would produce return-capitol.

I don't see indication that Keyhelper can process or produce sequences of keys, but I hope I've just overlooked or misinterpreted the docs.  Can anyone enlighten me?

Edit: As you may have guessed, "Nepbie" is supposed to be "Newbie".  I wish I could blame Keyhelper for that, but I don't think anyone would believe it.

[wmadan]

RobbH,

I'd be interested if there was an answer to your question about "intelligent" capitalization, On the (e-hem, e-hem) Ipaqs, the Pocket PC OS would do this. That was a great feature.

Bill

[ashikase]

RobbH:

The <release> tag is apparently used for keys that provide a seperate function when pressed in combination with the 'Fn' key. Supposedly when setting one of these keys, if the <release> key code is not set to the "Fn value", the "Fn value" not might work properly. However, I have not run into this problem with my own use - it may be possible that it is no longer necessary.

As for translating key sequences, no, I don't believe keyhelper is capable of this. It may be possible to accomplish this functionality with one of the available input plugins, such as QPOBox, but I personally have no experience with any of them.

- ashikase
- anpachi, gifu, japan

[RobbH]

I'd be interested if there was an answer to your question about "intelligent" capitalization, On the (e-hem, e-hem) Ipaqs, the Pocket PC OS would do this. That was a great feature.

Bill
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Bill, this was available for the HP 200LX palmtop, which I used until just a few weeks ago.  That's how I got interested in it.  Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be do-able with Keyhelper.

As I mentioned, there's an applet known variously as Custom Keyboard, Custom Input, and Customizable Keyboard here:

[a href=\"http://www.blackie.dk/Zaurus/custominput/]http://www.blackie.dk/Zaurus/custominput/[/url]

It uses a configuration file in xml, similar to Keyhelper's, but not the same format.  I can provide a configuration file that will convert a space followed by a double letter into a space followed by a capital letter.  It works (I think) with all 26 standard English letters, a-z.  This makes it easy to capitalize the first letter in a word, by pressing it twice.  It should be a simple matter to add elements to it to convert period-space-letter to period-space-capital.  This would make for easy capitalization of the first word in a sentence, as long as it's not the first sentence in a paragraph.

I don't know if it's possible for Custom Keyboard to catch a return followed by a letter and change it to return followed by a capital, so there may not be any help for the first sentence in a paragraph.   I probably will not pursue it further, because this applet is not compatible with Keyhelper, and I don't want to give up the task-switching capability that Keyhelper provides.  If you'd like to experiment with it, I'd be happy to provide my configuration file.

Intelligent capitalization would be a great feature to have.

[RobbH]

As for translating key sequences, no, I don't believe keyhelper is capable of this. It may be possible to accomplish this functionality with one of the available input plugins, such as QPOBox, but I personally have no experience with any of them.

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Thank you for the information, Ashikase.  QPOBox is very interesting, but doesn't appear suitable for my purposes.

Does anyone else know of any plugins that will work with Keyhelper to interpret multi-key sequences and output other multi-key sequences?

[Stubear]

As for translating key sequences, no, I don't believe keyhelper is capable of this. It may be possible to accomplish this functionality with one of the available input plugins, such as QPOBox, but I personally have no experience with any of them.

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Thank you for the information, Ashikase.  QPOBox is very interesting, but doesn't appear suitable for my purposes.

Does anyone else know of any plugins that will work with Keyhelper to interpret multi-key sequences and output other multi-key sequences?
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There should be quite a lot of stuff about keyhelper in the forums, and I wrote an [a href=\"https://www.oesf.org/index.php?title=Introduction_to_KeyHelper]Intro to Keyhelper[/url] for the howto of the ZaurusUserGroup.

If you have the shift key set to toggle then you can capitalize without having to press both at once (although that works too). With my current set up to get a capital C it press Shift then press C, the key pressed after that is lowercare again. Not exactly what you asked for but unfortunately I've been unable to find anything that allows keyhelper to work with multiple keys other than Shift, Ctrl, Fn, but I don't believe it is undoable. It would be great for accented characters (umlauts etc)

You might try emailing the author. He is quite helpful and may be planning something like this already.

Stu

[RobbH]

There should be quite a lot of stuff about keyhelper in the forums, and I wrote an Intro to Keyhelper for the howto of the ZaurusUserGroup.

If you have the shift key set to toggle then you can capitalize without having to press both at once (although that works too). With my current set up to get a capital C it press Shift then press C, the key pressed after that is lowercare again. Not exactly what you asked for but unfortunately I've been unable to find anything that allows keyhelper to work with multiple keys other than Shift, Ctrl, Fn, but I don't believe it is undoable. It would be great for accented characters (umlauts etc)

You might try emailing the author. He is quite helpful and may be planning something like this already.

Stu
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Stubear, your introduction to Keyhelper was what got me started on this quest.  Many thanks!

The sticky shift key is helpful, but I'd still like to find a way to avoid the shift key as much as possible.  Intelligent capitalization can do a lot to speed up typing on a small keyboard.

Do you know if the author of Keyhelper reads English, or does he depend on translation engines?

[Stubear]

Stubear, your introduction to Keyhelper was what got me started on this quest.  Many thanks!

The sticky shift key is helpful, but I'd still like to find a way to avoid the shift key as much as possible.  Intelligent capitalization can do a lot to speed up typing on a small keyboard.

Do you know if the author of Keyhelper reads English, or does he depend on translation engines?
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Yeah, I can see the intelligent capitalization being very handy.

I don't know directly if the author reads English, but my experience is that almost all Japanese software developers have a very strong grasp of written English (This is also true of most university aged Japanese as well). If you keep your sentences short (avoid lots of pasive voice and multiple clauses in a single sentence) and give obvious examples (as you have already done in this post) I can't imagine you having any problems communicating via email

Stu

P.S. Glad you found the intro to keyhelper usefull, I suppose I should get my act together and finish the rest of the features of keyhelper.

[SNi]

I put together a keyhelper.xml file to do the sticky shift and the two extensions in your tutorial. On giving it a try I found that the sticky shift didn't work but the [shift] + [home] and [shift] + [menu] did.   I have aC3000, I wonder if I should put the xml file in a different place than /home/zaurus/settings..

Also, after futzing around for a bit I decided to pursue later and I actually deleted the keyhelper.xml file  Even though I've rebooted several times I was surprised to find the 2 extensions continued to work just fine w/o the file..... Is that normal (and the program stores this somewhere so you only need the xml file once), or does the C3000 come with this 'built-in'??  
SNi

Yeah, I can see the intelligent capitalization being very handy.
I don't know directly if the author reads English, but my experience is that almost all Japanese software developers have a very strong grasp of written English (This is also true of most university aged Japanese as well). If you keep your sentences short (avoid lots of pasive voice and multiple clauses in a single sentence) and give obvious examples (as you have already done in this post) I can't imagine you having any problems communicating via email
Stu
P.S. Glad you found the intro to keyhelper usefull, I suppose I should get my act together and finish the rest of the features of keyhelper.
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