Re: APL mode

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

On 26/10/13 11:35, Juergen Sauermann wrote:
> Hi Rustom,
>
> With xmodmap you can make Alt and Alt-Gr different modifiers

Okay, seems like there may be wheels being reinvented in them thar hills:

xmodmap is _old_, xkb [1] exists. Though xkb is perhaps confusing and 
baroque, it's now clearly important to note that current xkb packages 
ubiquitous on gnu+linux systems _already include_ several variations of 
apl symbols [2], and you can use them [3].

They already look vaguely suitable for use with GNU APL, though there 
might be some different choices made, I didn't exhaustively verify.

I'm afraid I personally tend to just "muddle through" xkb stuff right 
now, I'm not the right person to ask for in-depth support and advice 
with xkb. Perhaps you could contact the relevant xkb apl layout 
devs/maintainers named in [2] itself to discuss meeting your GNU APL 
keyboard needs.  If, of course, they're not already met - and maybe it's 
early enough that GNU APL might also make changes if it indeed picked 
some different symbols to other unicode apls, there are a lot of 
lookalike unicode symbols...

> I also believe that it is important to have the same method inside and
> outside emacs.

I think it's not such a problem if some intra-emacs quail input method 
works a bit differently, such input methods are more for people who 
either don't want to have a desktop-wide apl layout as above enabled 
and/or use emacs on a text terminal or with a peculiar input device or 
something.

IMO an emacs apl mode for editing apl sources (and presumably a related 
inferior-apl for interactive apl interpreters under emacs) shouldn't 
need to get into handling actual apl symbol input, that's more of a job 
for xkb as above outside/over emacs, with quail input method(s) inside 
emacs being nice to have.

[1] http://www.x.org/wiki/XKB/

[2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xkeyboard-config/tree/symbols/apl

Already present on my Debian 7.x system:
$ dpkg -S /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/apl
xkb-data: /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/apl


[3] 
http://aplinquisition.blogspot.com/2013/07/configuring-apl-keyboard-with-i3-window.html