Gtk+ keyboard layout handling

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From: Michael Leuchtenburg
Subject: Gtk+ keyboard layout handling
Date: 22:40 on 25 Apr 2006
X has a system to handle keyboard layouts. While it's far from perfect,
it functions. If I want to change between two layouts (QWERTY and
Dvorak, say, leaving an easy escape to QWERTY for other users of my
systems), then I can just bind that to hitting both shift keys at once.

Skip forward up the chain to Gtk+. Gtk+ likes to second guess X. If I
have both QWERTY and Dvorak available as layouts, it will use the QWERTY
keys for all the application shortcuts. Because, after all, Gtk+ knows
better than X what the user wants. It's too much to ask it to fucking
pay attention to the keyboard change.

Dvorak is the default layout? No, no, that doesn't matter. Clearly the
user wants to use QWERTY keybindings anyways. After all, everyone uses
QWERTY! And Gtk+ shouldn't offer any way to configure it some other way, 
since it knows what they *really* want. It's not like different users
might want different things, after all. Configurability is for wusses,
and so is paying attention to what the user configured.

SO. MUCH. HATE.

Of course, much of this should really be developer-hate, since this is
apparently considered to be a feature:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162726

But isn't all software hate really developer hate, in the end?

-- 
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