[maemo-developers] Maemo 5 Keymaps - The Saga of Pipe & Tab

[From: Ryan Abel]

Many people are likely to complain that the N900's 3-row keyboard does  
not contain enough keys to be usable. Notably missing are important  
characters like tab and pipe.

Now, there _should_ be a relatively straightforward way to fix this  
with Xmodmap. But as xev wasn't properly setup to receive keypresses  
when I first began this saga, I started out by trying to edit the  
symbol files directly. Unfortunately this proved to have no noticeable  
effect.

So qwerty12 compiled a patched xev, I grabbed keycodes and I spent a  
couple hours trying to convince the device that it'd be a really great  
idea for shift-fn-b to send a pipe, for fn-right arrow to send tab,  
and a dozen other shifted and unshifted combinations.

End result? Either no effect or outright dead keys.

The grapevine tells me that khertan may have had some luck getting  
things to behave, has anybody else been able to,  too? If so, can you  
enlighten us with your secrets? We have nearly 30 additional  
characters available with shift-fn and another 6 that have no fn  
character. It would be great to bind these to some useful purpose.