Special keys apparently not supported

[Moini]

Hi - my keyboard has a couple special keys that I would like to be able to use to quickly access SpeechNote's functionality.

Specifically, those are:

XF86Calculator XF86Home XF86Mail

They do not seem to be used by my OS (Linux Mint), so theoretically, they should be working, but they are not. I suspect that maybe SpeechNote does not support those special keys?

[mkiol]

Hi. Thanks for the report.

Did you try to just set key shortcut to "Calculator", "Home Page" or "Launch Mail"?

Speech Note uses Qt abstractions to handle these key events. Valid names accepted by Qt are listed here. The name of the shortcut should be the same as in this list (including spaces). Additionally, it looks like these names are translated, so if your language on the system is not English, you should use the translated version. I know, it's a bit complicated and weird at the same time :)

Also make sure that key binding is not already configured for something else. For instance, my keyboard has "Media Stop" key. To make it work I had to remove KDE Plasma default shortcut for stopping media.

For example:

[Moini]

Mmh, thank you, @mkiol - using Linux Mint with Xfce here.

When I press the default shortcuts (and have them set in the settings), a red microphone symbol appears in my notification area and recording works, but nothing happens when I use 'Calculator' or 'Taschenrechner' (which should be the correct translation to German, but I didn't know where to find the Qt translation files - looked for them, but nothing came up on their Github, or in their Wiki. Maybe they don't have any...).

I do have Input Remapper installed already anyway ... that should do the trick, too.

It would be nice to be able to just press the key while the entry field is active to set it as the new shortcut.

[mkiol]

I think I found where is the problem.

So, there are actually two steps of "translations":

1. from text you provide in the widget to Qt key code (done in Qt lib)
2. from Qt key code to X11 key code (done in QHotkey lib that I'm using in Speech Note to register global key bindings)

The first one works fine. When "Calculator" or "Launch Mail" is specified, the key code is correct, but the problem occurs in the second case. It seems that QHotkey only supports a very limited number of XF86 keys. Fortunately, I'm building the QHotkey library from sources in Speech Note, so I think I can patch it and extend this list to other keys as well, such as XF86Calculator and others.

I will try to implement this in the next release.

Thanks for finding this interesting problem. I learned something new :)

[Moini]

Sounds good, thank you, @mkiol !

Do you know where users need to look to find the correct strings for their own language? E.g. I'm not at all sure what someone would translate 'Home Page' to, or 'Launch Email'. I could try out multiple things that come to mind, but being able to look it up in some po/ts/... file would be much faster... (and if that were mentioned in a tooltip somewhere in the software, that would be the most helpful way).

[mkiol]

I did a deeper investigation and fortunately, both English and translated names are supported in Qt. You can set "Launch Mail" or "Mail starten" and both are converted to the same key code "Qt::Key_LaunchMail". The problem of finding the right translation is no longer relevant. Good!

Fix for supporting XFree86 keys: 4fff44e88cf707d8ca81ecf4d02191867b2854c1. Will be included in the next release.

[Moini]

Cool, thank you, @mkiol ! Lots of detective work here ...

[mkiol]

The fix is included in the latest v4.6.1 release.

Following XFree86 keys are supported:

X11 key code	Shortcut name
XF86Back	Back
XF86Forward	Forward
XF86Stop	Stop
XF86Refresh	Refresh
Favorites	Favorites
XF86OpenURL	Open URL
XF86HomePage	Home Page
XF86Search	Search
XF86Mail	Launch Mail
XF86Memo	Memo
XF86History	History
XF86AddFavorite	Add Favorite
XF86HotLinks	Hot Links
XF86Calculator	Calculator
XF86Documents	Documents
XF86Tools	Tools
XF86Pictures	Pictures
XF86Music	Music
XF86Option	Option
XF86Display	Display
XF86Launch0	Launch (0)
XF86Launch1	Launch (1)
XF86Launch2	Launch (2)
XF86Launch3	Launch (3)
XF86Launch4	Launch (4)
XF86Launch5	Launch (5)
XF86Launch6	Launch (6)
XF86Launch7	Launch (7)
XF86Launch8	Launch (8)
XF86Launch9	Launch (9)
XF86LaunchA	Launch (A)
XF86LaunchB	Launch (B)
XF86LaunchC	Launch (C)
XF86LaunchD	Launch (D)
XF86LaunchE	Launch (E)
XF86LaunchF	Launch (F)

[Moini]

Thank you, just tested it with the English terms, and they work! :D