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Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2009 07:19:01 +0000
From: Andy Koppe <andy DOT koppe AT gmail DOT com>
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To: Angelo Graziosi <angelo DOT graziosi AT alice DOT it>
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Subject: Re: MinTTY
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Angelo Graziosi wrote:
> I cannot insert the character : '~' (tilde, i.e. the 'home dir').
> Usually with my italian keyboard I use 'ALT GR'+ì (accented 'i'): this
> works with xterm, urxvt, rxvt; with Cygwin.bat I need ALT+ASCII code.

For characters beyond space MinTTY relies on Windows' keyboard layout 
mechanism, through the ToUnicode function. So I had a look at the 
Italian Windows keyboard layout and was quite surprised to find that it 
simply doesn't have a tilde. (They found space for two Euros though, on 
AltGr+E and AltGr+5.)

So what do you do when you need the tilde in other applications, e.g. 
for typing the bitwise-not operator in C?

X implement its own keyboard layout mechanism on top of lower-level 
Windows scancodes or virtual key codes, so apparently the Italian X 
keyboard layout does have a tilde on AltGr+ì.

I'm very reluctant to add locale-specific keyboard layout handling code 
to MinTTY and I think this issue would best be addressed by adding the 
tilde to the Windows keyboard layout, which would make it available 
across all Windows apps. Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) 
available from http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx is a 
free (as in beer) and convenient way to do that. I've whipped up an 
"Italian - Tilde" layout and will send that in a separate mail.

(Btw, the authority on all things Windows keyboards is MSKLC author 
Michael Kaplan, who blogs about it at 
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/tags/Keyboards/default.aspx)

> Also the ALT+ASCII code from numeric pad does not work.

Sorry about that. I couldn't be bothered to implement that DOS relic 
when I replaced PuTTY's keyboard handling, mostly because it's a 
godawful user interface, even more so on laptops. It is still a Windows 
standard though; therefore I ought to make it work. Issue 17.

> Besides this, it would be nice if MinTTY were multi-tabs (mrxvt,
> konsole) and if an image could be loaded as background (like mrxvt...)

See issue 8 for why I won't implement tabs. I'm not keen on the 
background image either, but I've entered issue 18 for it.

> And for installation, the method suggested by Yaakov is the best!

Couldn't agree more.

Andy

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