Re: emacs on the N800

[Adam Spiers <orgmode@adamspiers.org>]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 08:00:08AM +0100, Bastien wrote:
> Thanks to both of you for your answers.
> 
> After spending way too much time browsing the internet for demo videos
> and people talking of the usefulness of the physical keyboard, I think 
> I will go for the N810 (requiring that I'm very patient and will send
> back the N800 currently laying unpacked on my desk...)

Ah, you already have the N800, I didn't realise that.  You must have a
lot of willpower to leave that unopened :-)

> The two things that made me hesitate:
> 
> - If the d-pad is on the physical keyboard, perhaps it means that you
>   often have to slide the keyboard out, even if you just need the d-pad?

That's true, but the only time I've actually missed this in the few
days since I've had it is when using the xterm, and for that I
configured tappable Left/Right/Up/Down shortcuts on the screen.  They
take up valuable shortcut space which could be used for less mundane
shortcuts.  But hopefully I can get emacs running in X11 mode so that
I can tap to navigate, and use org-mouse for editing - though this
will require some tweaks since obviously there are not 3 mouse
buttons.  According to a few google search results, tap-and-hold
apparently emulates a right-click but I don't know in which layer of
the stack this is implemented:

  https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1839
  https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2078
  http://live.gnome.org/GtkStylusMode

> - Apparently the top first row of keys (QWERTY) is a bit too close to
>   the screen part of the device.  Making it difficult to type with the
>   thumb, at least when you're not sitting.

I read this too, but I haven't found that at all so far, but then my
thumbs are on the average side of small.  My mine complaint with the
keyboard would be the lack of tactile separate between keys; however
people say that after a few days you get used to it and I haven't used
it that long yet.

> Unless Adam tells me that the physical keyboard is not as useful as he
> first thought (maybe for the reasons I mention here), I'll go for N810.

Entering text by tapping can be very frustrating in certain
situations, so I suspect I'd miss having the physical keyboard.  The
selection of the small tap keyboard for stylus and the large finger
keyboard seems to be quite hard to control - sometimes you get one,
sometimes the other.  In normal text fields it's not too bad, but in
the xterm app it's almost impossible to get a finger keyboard.
Software bug no doubt, but who knows how long it will take to be
fixed?  As I said before, the finger keyboard takes over the whole
screen so you lose all context during entry.  Also perhaps more
importantly, the stylus/finger keyboards make chords impossible,
e.g. there is no Control AFAICS.  The physical keyboard has the
following by default:

  Key          Event reported by xev
  ----------------------------------
  Fn           ISO_Level3_Shift
  Left Shift   Shift_L
  Right Shift  Shift_L :-(
  Chr          Multi_key
  Ctrl         Control_R
  Enter        KP_Enter
  d-pad centre Enter

Shame that Right Shift doesn't generate Shift_R - could have rebound
one of the shifts as Meta in that case.  Maybe this is tweakable at a
lower level rather than being hard-wired in the circuits though.

> Looking forward to installing Emacs 23 on it and share experience :)

Aye :-)