Description Markus Keller 2009-09-15 15:40:05 EDT

SWT should provide a way to find out what characters can be directly typed with hardware keys with the current keyboard layout.

JFace should use that support in org.eclipse.jface.bindings.BindingManager.getBestActiveBindingFor(ParameterizedCommand) to avoid showing keybindings that are unreachable for the user.

E.g. in bug 150087 the "Back" command is bound to "Command+Alt+Left" and "Command+[", but the latter is only available as a hardware key on US keyboard layouts, but not on most international keyboards. Currently, JFace has no way to know whether it can show the shorter "Command+[" or whether it should show the fallback that's accessible on all keyboards.

I'm open to how the API in SWT would look like:
- It could be a method on Display that checks a single character (I see code for this already in the post(Event) method) and returns either just a boolean to tell whether the character is directly mapped to a key, or even a result that tells what modifier keys need to be pressed to generate the character or if it is not typeable at all.
- It could also be a method that returns a char[] with all characters that are directly typeable without modifiers.
- It could return a mapping from characters to keycodes that generate the respective characters.
- ... whatever is easiest to implement for SWT