[Toybox] Would you consider adding showkey...but

[Isaac Dunham]

On Wed, 15 May 2013 11:32:28 -0500
Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> On 05/14/2013 08:04:33 PM, scsijon wrote:
> > Would you consider adding the busybox showkey, but with a user set  
> > time
> > including 0 for immediate, rather than the default 10 seconds?
> 
> Um, details?
> 
> I don't think I've ever used busybox showkey, but I'm happy to look
> at patch submissions. (I may be a little overwhelmed with _dealing_
> with them, but I'm working as fast as I can. Still chewing on
> ifconfig when I have time, and then mount's queued up right after
> that...)
> 
> Let's see, fire it up in an xterm and see what it does:
> 
> landley at driftwood:~$ ./busybox-x86_64 showkey
> showkey: KDGKBMODE: Invalid argument
>                                      landley at driftwood:~$
> 
> And it left my terminal in raw mode. Very nice. My static busybox
> lying around is 1.19.0, maybe they've fixed this since then? Git log
> on showkey.c says last touched in 2011, so I'm guessing no. Maybe it  
> doesn't like xfce's terminal program? Dunno...

showkey is intended to be used from a VT, not X.
It reads a keypress (apparently from /dev/console), then prints its
keycode/scancode. 
One implementation is esr's showkey, http://catb.org/~esr/showkey/
(which is MIT license, weighing in at 127 lines including whitespace
and comments).
There is also a (1993?!) GPL2+ Debian variant that corresponds to what
busybox has.

Also, timeout=0 may be tricky if you need to wait some time for a
keypress...

> > We wish to add the ability of checking a <ctrl>, <alt>, etc. key
> > in the init
> > and control the response depending on the keycode for function,  
> > rather than
> > expect them to wait 10 seconds each time.
> 
> Send me a patch?