ThinkPad Hotkeys

[Felix Kaechele]

On 24.02.2010 07:30, Sven Lankes wrote:
> The only keys that aren't being recognized for me are:
>
> Touchpad on/off (Fn-F8):
>
>    this one might be handled by the bios but as I don't
>    have a touchpad I cannot test this.

It is not handled by the Embedded Controller (EC). It emits an X event: 
XF86TouchpadToggle

> Eject CD (Fn-F9):
>
>    again this may be handled by the bios - I cannot test
>    it either because my x200s doesn't have an optical drive.

This is not the button to eject an optical medium. It is used to eject 
your ThinkPad from the Dock/UltraBase. This event should be handled by 
acpi/udev. I will test it when I get home. It does not emit an X event 
though. Also there is no good Docking support in any DE at the moment. 
For example when undocking, whatever responsible for device management 
should unmount the filesystems that are on devices connected to the dock.

> Keys that aren't doing anything while they could:
>
> Screensaver:
>
>    this could maybe lock the screen by default but the KDE
>    default for that action is CTRL-ALT-L and as it's not possible in global
>    shortcuts to assign two shortcuts for one action I don't know how this
>    could be achieved.

Setting the shortcut from CTRL-ALT-L to Fn-F2 works fine. But as you 
said, there cannot be more than one shortcut per action.

> Battery:
>
>    This one is interesting - the powerdevil battery plasmoid actually has
>    keyboard shortcuts in it's settings and setting it to "Battery" will
>    bring up the battery screen when the shortcut is pressed just fine.
>
>    This should probably default to Battery as it's currently not set at
>    all. But why doesn't that show up under "Global Shortcuts" in System
>    Settings?

Yes this should definitely be default.

> Sleep&  Suspend:
>
>    I cannot see any way to make those Buttons Suspend to RAM&  Disk in
>    the Keyboard settings. Anyone?

This is the most annoying. I just expect those buttons to work.

> Display:
>
>    That one is supposed to cycle through Display / External Display. I
>    don't think there is anything in KDE to make use of this short of
>    calling xrandr directly?

This is also extremely and gratuitously annoying. What does KDE expect 
me to do whenever I give a presentation or use my home multimonitor 
setup? Open the settings dialog every time?

Another key that doesn't work is Fn-Space which is Desktop Zoom.

Especially the lack of hotkey support (as I use them very much) and the 
bad multimonitor support (I wrote about this on IRC a lot already) 
almost make me switch back to GNOME after this week.
I'm just trying KDE 4.4 with Rawhide and my experience is even worse. 
The brightness keys also don't work. But this might be due to other 
Rawhide-isms.

Really, the only hotkey that does work without being quirky is the 
ThinkLight. And that is handled by the EC. Hotkey support is just 
utterly broken in KDE compared to GNOME. I think this is just something 
the average user expects to work. If it does not it just gives them a 
bad experience and they might drop KDE or even Fedora (or even Linux) 
completely. Those are the details that do count in a positive user 
experience :)

Felix