feature request: select keyboard

[rob-miller]

Hi Vladimir, 1.4.0 continues to work well for me, and inspires more laziness!

I would like it if an available action were to set the keyboard layout (from the list in the menubar drop-down presumably).

My spec is that I detect the work context and when there have always plugged in a USB keyboard with a different layout to the built-in macbook keyboard.

I have seen the reference to KeyRemap4MacBook but this seems like overkill, though have not installed and tested. I did already create a custom keymap for the external keyboard, though there is room for improvement. I have found online a snippet of applescript ("tell (1st menu bar item of menu bar 1 whose description is "text input") to {click, click (menu 1's menu item layoutName)}"). Clearly then I can build a small bridge to do what I want in CP already, but this seems (naively) like a feasible and useful action? As I said, CP inspires delicious laziness :-)

Also I saw your reference to 'soon' enabling multiple contexts at once -- seems like we could then have automatic keyboard map switching on detection of the plugged-in keyboard ?

Very best,

rob.

[VladimirTechMan]

Hi Rob,

I am glad to hear back from you again. And glad to hear that CP gives you a little more time for a useful laziness. ;)

The action you described should, indeed, be do-able with scripting or some external utilities (to be called from a script), thus you may still want to explore those possible ways — at least, your laziness may motivate you to do that before CP gets it as an available action. :) I will definitely put that in the request list for future versions of CP. Though I would not stick my neck out right now to set any dates when I address that in more details: The next few months will be busy with a few business trips and speaking at a few conferences in Russia and the USA. Preparing to that. Thus, please, be ready for a little bit of waiting — or may be one of my colleague developers will decide to implement it before I can.

Right now our small developer team is more focused on fixing a few recent reports on CP 1.4.0 causing full CPU utilization (on a somewhat rare specific occasion). Plus a few minor regressions noted in 1.4.0.

As for "enabling multiple contexts" in CP. Well, indeed, that was a comment from Dustin. :) But he stated it correct as he was planning on that before and we discussed it a little bit in the past. The only thing is that we first need to deliberately define how exactly that logic will behave — in combination with the existing logic for mutually exclusive contexts with possible nested contexts in them. That will require some more thinking, I guess. Anyways, that is in the do-to list for future versions. Dustin (@dustinrue) may want to comment on that more. :)

[dustinrue]

Repository now contains code that makes it possible to have multiple active contexts. On the surface it works (it can activate and deactivate multiple contexts) but it breaks a number of things too. Sign up for the ControlPlane group on groups.google.com (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/controlplane-support) and look for more details on soon.

[ramirez]

What's the status for this one? Any intentions of allowing configuring the selected keyboard layout with controlPlane?

[samf]

+1 on configuring the keyboard layout. As a Dvorak typist, who has a hardware-mapped keyboard at work, this would be extremely useful to me.

Thanks!

[ouataiveur]

+1 for switching keyboards based on context. CP is great, this feature would be a welcome addition as I switch keyboards 3+ times a day ...

Thanks

[mjpieters]

I installed ControlPlane (after years not having used it) specifically to switch keyboards automatically. I have a great native Dvorak keyboard, so once plugged in, I want to switch layouts.

For now, the keyboardSwitcher solution does work, however.