perwindowlayout: Improved documentation

This commit is contained in:
Alex Ermolov 2015-03-10 12:05:14 +03:00
parent 06f9584e19
commit 07c30f5c1b

View file

@ -1,13 +1,59 @@
** Problem
Default keyboard layout switching mechanism within X session has one
specific trait - it toggles layouts systemwide, so for example, you
may fall into following:
1) having firefox window active, change keyboard layout for the one
other than English
2) switch to another opened window and have the layout that you chose
in firefox window
3) change layout / switch window as many times as you want, and have
the same picture
Some of us find this acceptable, but other people find this rather
distracting, so those last ones might want to preserve each keyboard
layout for each open window over time, until they want to change it
manually.
But then there is another problem, which is specific to Emacs editor -
there are two independent ways of changing keyboard layout. One way
is to use internal Emacs machinery and another is to lay on systemwide
mechanism that was described above. The problem itself is about using
the system wide switcher breaks whole Emacs hotkeys functionality as
for example "C-x b" changes to C-<1> <2>, whatever keys are binded to
<1> and <2> respectively in one's alternate keyboard layout, so barely
all Emacs keybindings stop working.
The solution here is to not use systemwide layout switcher and rely on
Emacs switcher instead. But we must be careful not to forward keypresses
to Emacs, when changing the keyboard layout. On the other hand, it is
pretty handy to have one keybinding for switching layouts in all
applications including Emacs (rather than have separate keybinding for
Emacs only)
This contrib extension was written with purpose of addressing the
described problems.
** Usage
Add this to your =.stumpwmrc=:
#+BEGIN_SRC lisp
(load-module "perwindowlayout")
#+END_SRC
For extension to start maintaining per-window keyboard layouts, add
this, to your =.stumpwmrc=:
#+BEGIN_SRC lisp
(run-commands "enable-per-window-layout")
#+END_SRC
Then it begins maintaining per-window keyboard layout statuses.
Then, to actually switch keyboard layout, issue the command
"switch-window-layout", or bind it to a key, for example:
#+BEGIN_SRC lisp
(define-key *top-map* (kbd "C-\\") "switch-window-layout")
#+END_SRC
Use the code below to turn it off:
To stop maintaining per-window keyboard layouts, add
this somewhere else, to your =.stumpwmrc= (in some hook, for example):
#+BEGIN_SRC lisp
(run-commands "disable-per-window-layout")
#+END_SRC
@ -17,5 +63,3 @@ This is in some way specific to Emacs.
** Tasks
*** TODO Try to generalize for other specific applications (other than Emacs)