ChucK and International Keyboards

[Inventor]

I wrote an application that uses the keyboard in ChucK, but people in Belgium and the UK cannot use it. I can find some info about keyboard layouts on the web, but there seems to be no actual keyboard code tables for these keyboards. What gives? What should I do?

[Kassen]

This is indeed tricky. I myself use a Dutch keyboard layout without any branded (Apple/ MS) keys but you can't get laptop keyboards that way so sometimes when traveling more lightly I have to us the US layout on my laptop itself.

It gets tricky when using the keyboard in ChucK. It depends on what you want; do the keys you use need to be on the same spot on the keyboard or do they need to refer to the same character? Depending on what you want either will be more suitable but neither is fool proof; not all keys have acci characters associated with them and not all layouts are the same; for example on my keyboard there are three keys between the "L" and the "enter", on a US layout only two.

One good method may be to have a class called "keys" and define a list of integers in it named after keys. If you do that you can use code like;

if (msg.which == keys.space) do.something();

That saves a lot of "magic numbers" and is quite easy to reconfigure.

[Inventor]

OK, I can do that, but first I must know what numbers ChucK will report from a Belgian keyboard, for example. Does anyone know of the codes for such a thing?

[Kassen]

Sorry, I do it all by hand with a notebook myself.

[Inventor]

That's OK Kassen, I'll just have to have my test users tell me their keyboard codes.