Textadept on Haiku OS

[M0JXD]

Hi Mitchell/Orbitalquark (and other Textadept users),

After some messing I was able to get Textadept Qt to build and run on Haiku OS. I only needed to adjust five LOC between CMakeLists.txt and textadept.c, real testament to your work on portability!

At the moment it's a bit bodged as a proof of concept. I needed to change the linking for libdl and iconv in CMake - I'm not super familiar with CMake so I forced it. Likewise with the "textadept_home" variable I manually set it to be the correct string for the install directory it would build to, so some more work is needed there. Haven't built the terminal version yet either.

If you want to support Haiku "officially" (I imagine GitHub builds would be hard to set up, so maybe in a "build it yourself" manner same as BSD is) I can look at cleaning this up and pushing the changes? There's still testing to do but from what I've seen the core functionality works, although it's not opening the manual in the browser at the moment.

Even if not I thought you'd like to know anyways :)

Thanks.

[orbitalquark]

Nice work! Once you get it fully functional, then we can start thinking about committing your changes :) Let me know if I can be of help.

[M0JXD]

That sounds great!

It's a bit difficult to progress as the networking in Haiku is quite slow and has crashed on me few times. Plus I don't really trust the browser's security for logging in to GitHub etc.

For now I've put the changes here if you want to have a go: https://github.com/M0JXD/textadept-haiku
There's an open issue detailing how to build.

I have no clue about anything Haiku, I just thought it's be fun to try. Next thing is to find out how an application is expected to discover it's own directory.

Will probably take me a while to reach full functionality but I'll keep going at it when I get spare time :)

[M0JXD]

Terminal version works too, just had to install ncurses dev libraries from HaikuDepot and pass the option to CMake :)

[M0JXD]

Hi again!

I've been working to fix some of the issues, it's working great and I've enjoyed using Textadept to work on Textadept :)

The only big issue is the key bindings, as both Ctrl and Alt seem to disable Shift. Plus they allow to options to swap Ctrl and Alt as by default Alt is the control key. So maybe Haiku needs a whole new keymap for things like folding, split views etc., although it's probably worth getting the input of regular Haiku users before committing to making a new one. Likewise it'll be worth a post to the Haiku forums anyways too see if they have interest in packaging to Haiku Depot.

Sorry about CMakeList.txt, your generator expressions are very nice, but because the only way to test for Haiku is by manually checking CMAKE_HOST_SYSTEM_NAME, you gain some stuff that could've been added to the expression thanks to CMake not having a variable for it.

Let me know if you have any thoughts, I imagine you'll want to give things a good check over and testing before anything. I've also added more info in the first issue for details about setting icons and making convenience shortcuts which could be added to the manual.

Thank you!!! :)

[M0JXD]

Weirdly enough the ones that rely on capital letters do seem to work, e.g. "Ctrl+b" and "Ctrl+B" do their respective actions correctly. (Open buffer list and Run Build Command)

[M0JXD]

If I override the folding keybind in the init.lua with:
keys['ctrl+]'] = textadept.menu.menubar['View/Toggle Current Fold'][2]

Then both "ctrl+]" and "ctrl+shift+]" (aka 'ctrl+}') cause the toggle to happen.

[orbitalquark]

Okay, so we've confirmed that Ctrl+Alt does not cancel Shift.

Textadept's key handler does some more processing before executing a key binding. You can uncomment this line

textadept/core/keys.lua

Line 188 in 39089d7

-- if CURSES then ui.statusbar_text = string.format('"%s"', key) end

and remove the if CURSES test to just always print to the statusbar. Now you'll see the fully processed key sequences as they are typed. See if that helps shed any light on the problem.

[M0JXD]

It's looking like for these few non-letter keys, Haiku does not apply the shift to the character as needed when ctrl and/or alt is also pressed. (On \ to become|, or on - to become _ etc.), so regardless of the shift Textadept receives the exact same shortcut:

keys_actual.mp4

I can't find other software on Haiku making use of these shortcuts (I have checked Kate, Geany, Genio, Koder and Pe) so it's hard to know what the expected behavior should be - Koder does use Ctrl+/ for toggling comments, which doesn't work on Textadept as it receives ctrl+? regardless of shift. Haiku's multiple control layouts is another aspect to struggle with as I've found that ctrl/alt+scroll to zoom only works with one layout. I'll keep investigating.

In an unrelated but somewhat relevant matter, I was using Textadept on Windows and had to disable the ctrl+alt+| shortcut - as a bit of background if your not from the UK, we have a problem where there's a lot of US style keyboards that have been adapted for the UK simply by swapping " and @, and changing the \ key for #, without our extra key between left shift and Z. Hence on Windows with such a keyboard the way to type | is with altgr+shift+#. But on Windows altgr is the same as ctrl+alt, so it's detected as the shortcut.

Thanks for your advice and insight!

[orbitalquark]

I cannot say I completely understand what you are describing (and I cannot follow what's going on in the video), so sorry in advance if I'm missing the details.

I wouldn't focus so much on the details of whether receiving Ctrl + Shift + / in events.KEY (printed in the terminal) produces Ctrl+? or Ctrl+Shift+? in events.KEYPRESS (printed in the statusbar). I'm more interested in if there's some sort of bug in the events.KEYPRESS logic that's not accurately reflecting the translation.

When you say "so regardless of the shift Textadept receives the exact same shortcut", do you mean events.KEY (printed in the terminal)?