#250 Pressing shift twice doesn't lock keys on the 5th row

[Anonymous]

Originally created by: jerryfle...@gmail.com

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. press shift, the keys on the 5th row are locked (alternative keys displayed, just as letter keys)
2. press shift again, 5th row changes back to its default state, while letter keys stay locked
3.

What is the expected behavior? What do you see instead?
Pressing shift twice should lock the 5th as well.

What version of Hacker's Keyboard are you using? (See "Debug" section at
the bottom of the app's Settings menu.)
All version after 1.26

On what phone or tablet?
P1000, running Android 2.3.4, or its emulator

If applicable, does this affect the 4-row or 5-row layout, or both?
Only the 5th row.

Which language(s)?
English.

Please provide any additional information below.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: Klaus.We...@gmail.com

This is intentional, it implements "caps lock", not "shift lock". I had mainly implemented this for use with keyboards such as French "AZERTY" that have letters on the top row.

I could add an option to let the user select between "shift lock" and "caps lock", but I'm curious why you prefer that behavior. Do you frequently need the top row punctuation together with uppercase letters?

Status: Accepted

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: jerryfle...@gmail.com

It turns out the only usecase of this keyboard for me is to open connectbot and begin a shell session, where punctuation characters are of equal importance to, or even means more than, alphanumeric ones. It would be very awkward to input, for example, the following command:

a_cmd 2>&1 | b_cmd %.!*@(com)

I would like to stay into the upper case state so as to input punctuation characters continuously, just like a standard PC keyboard (US layout, 104 keys), for otherwise it is very boring to switch back and forth.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: Klaus.We...@gmail.com

Please follow issue 177 for the feature request to add Shift Lock as an option.

I'm still not sure why you think this would be more useful - in your example above, you'd be able to type "2>&1" like this in the current setup:
  "2" Shift ">" "Shift" "&" "1"
  "2" Shift hold ">" "&" Shift release "1"

A shift lock would add the following sequence as an option, that's more keystrokes:
  "2" Shift Shift ">" "&" Shift "1"

I think sequences of 3 or more shifted punctuation characters are fairly rare even in command line use, and not frequently combined with uppercase characters, but this may vary based on your shell or language - I don't recognize the "%.!*@(com)" syntax, though some Perl expressions get close to that.

If I do get customizable keymaps working (see issue 13), I think it would be an interesting variant to do an AZERTY style layout where the 5th row is swapped, with punctuation by default and digits reachable via Shift.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: bob.walr...@gmail.com

The VERY annoying aspect here, for a french AZERTY user, is that the digits row doesn't stay locked (instead, on double tap of the shift key, the accented upper case letters appear) - so, it is now no longer possible to type a number (or one should go to the Fn screen).
Accented upper case letters are so seldom used in French, that this feature does not seem worthwhile. digits are much more often used!
Please comment on this observation.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: jerryfle...@gmail.com

So an option to choose between SHIFT_LOCK and CAPS_LOCK is fair enough.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: Klaus.We...@gmail.com

Ok, you've convinced me, I'll look into adding a shift lock option.

I'm still curious though how/why you are using the lock - I was assuming that it was largely used for sequences of uppercase characters, where uppercasing the accented characters would be more consistent, but it sounds as if Bob is primarily using it as a "num lock" for the AZERTY layout to get digits, and Jerry is using it as punctuation lock, and you are both not really interested in entering multiple uppercase letters? If that's true, I'm wondering if a separate shift key or mode may be more useful that just toggles the non-letter keys and leaves the letters unchanged, but that would be a nonstandard layout that would be more appropriate for a user-customized mapping.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: jerryfle...@gmail.com

It would help me, and all other programmers, I guess, more if the keyboard acts in a standard way with its behavior regarding shift states. It is useful for example, when one wants an all-uppercase constant, or a magic positional shell variable ${1#+*#} (this is to trim the first positional parameter, or am I wrong?) As the name suggests, this is a PC keyboard, and features a standard compliant layout which mainly benefits special key input. If one want localized support, for example, to input Chinese or French, I would suggest Latin IME or Google IME. Even hackers keyboard supports multiple languages, it is still very inconvenient to use it to input a normal sentence in any language simply because the keys are so small, especially on small screens, when 5-row layout is active.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: Klaus.We...@gmail.com

I'm still confused - typical US QWERTY keyboards have a Caps Lock key, not Shift Lock, and Hacker's Keyboard currently works the same way and just uppercases letters. You're asking for nonstandard behavior if you expect Shift Lock - I agree that this is a valid feature request, but it's still different from the way that physical keyboards behave.

How do you type strings such as "${1#+*#}" on a physical keyboard? I'd typically just hold down the Shift key while typing it, and you can do the same thing now in Hacker's Keyboard.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: jerryfle...@gmail.com

It is true. I can hold down the shift key while typing punctuation characters or upper case letters. But that would involve two hands/fingers doing it together, or I have to switch the shift key once for every special characters. Both ways are awkward to do on a small device. So in this case I guess most users, me included, would rather turn on the caps lock for the whole word, instead of shift lock for each letter. I know this is kind of nonstandard, but I guess it pays to make an exception from the accessibility point of view.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: Klaus.We...@gmail.com

Please try v1.34rc5 (or later) from https://code.google.com/p/hackerskeyboard/downloads/list and let me know if this works for you.

It now offers a choice of Shift Lock or Caps Lock. While locked, you can use multitouch shift to get the alternate caps/shift characters, for example to get digits in shift lock mode or 5th row punctuation in caps lock mode.

For Shift Lock, there's an additional option to control how it interacts with special keys. By default, Shift Lock only applies to regular keys (alphanumeric and punctuation), but it may be useful in some cases to enable it for all keys, for example shift-arrow selection on non-multitouch devices.

Mergedinto: 177
Status: Duplicate

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: jerryfle...@gmail.com

Yes. The Shift Lock does lock the 5th row now. Thanks.