[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] neat device

[From: Tapani Pälli]

ext John Meacham wrote:
> I got my nokia 770 the other day and love it. I have already started
> porting stuff and am happy to say my jhc haskell compiler can cross
> compile to maemo just fine.
>
> In any case, looking at the memory usage, hildon-input-method takes up a
> whopping 6.3 megs of real ram along with a decent chunk of x resources
> as reported by xrestop. This seems like an absurd amount for the little
> pretty cruddy (no offense) onscreen keyboard. it is the second largest
> user of memory after the desktop itself!
>   
It was optimized mainly for speed, nobody wants to write with a slow
one. It is hard to make a gtk-themable keyboard in that size without
using some memory and still be fast. What was your method of looking
memory usage? I have Massif graphs of IM taking ~3 MB at max.

> So I whipped up a little X keyboard which uses a more reasonable tens of
> k of RAM, and want to know the absolute shortest path to replacing the
> built in input method with it. I know I have to create a gtk-immodule,
> but can't find documentation anywhere about how to do that or how to get
> rid of hildon-input-method once I create my gtk-immodule. I am very
> familier with low level X11 programming, but not so much with gtk
> specifics.
>
>
> Also, what keeps respawning the hildon-input-method? I can kill it
> remotely and bask in the extra 6 megs of RAM for a few seconds before it
> restarts without me ever trying to actually use the input method.
>
> in any case, neat device. I hope to modify my 'emap' program
> http://repetae.net/john/computer/emap/ to provide support for the
> fullscreen and menu buttons for arbitrary non-hildonized apps along with
> keyboard support as I often use it as an X terminal to run remote
> applications. emap also can figure out what program is currently running
> so you can have a custom keyboard layout for each program. (xterm in
> particular could benefit from a custom layout with nice big ^C and ^D
> buttons :) )
>
> any pointers would be appreciated.
>
>         John
>
>   

// Tapani