Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 14:23:37 +0100
To: sdl@libsdl.org
From: Julian Brown <brown@compsci.bristol.ac.uk>
Subject: [SDL] [PATCH] API to enable caps lock/num lock release events

[Trying to send this again. Sorry for any repeats.]

Hi,

I'm new here, so apologies in advance if this is slightly clueless (I'm
not sure if/how often this issue has come up before!).

For a little program I'm porting (back to!) to Linux just for fun,
it'd be really handy to have caps lock (and num lock, but that's not
so immediately pressing for me) treated like an ordinary key (*). I
assume the vast majority of machines can handle this from an OS/hardware
perspective, so it seems a little strange to me for there to be *no way*
of enabling this functionality in SDL.

So, this patch adds an API:

  int SDL_EnableLockKeyRelease(int enable);

with fairly similar semantics to SDL_EnableUNICODE: 1 to enable the
feature, 0 to disable it, -1 to just read previous value. So, e.g.,
I can put at the start of my program:

  SDL_EnableLockKeyRelease(SDL_TRUE);

and then caps lock & num lock will behave "as expected".

I've tested on a grand total of one machine type, x86/Linux with X11.
Please feel free to reformat/rewrite/augment the patch if necessary!

Cheers,

Julian

(*) It's a micro emulator, so needs fairly raw keyboard input. A quick
web search seemed to reveal other people had encountered similar
problems, but I couldn't find any existing solutions.

-----

...and here's a version with slightly fewer obvious bugs up-front (I
missed two break statements and spelled the error message wrong...).

Cheers,

Julian