[BRLTTY] attribute tracking, was re: Recommended live distribution

[Klaus Knopper]

Hello Nicolas,

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 07:07:00PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Sep 2012, S. Massy wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 02:04:28PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > > On Wed, 19 Sep 2012, Dave Mielke wrote:
> > > > I think I know what you mean by profiles - changing brltty's settings based on 
> > > > the current foreground probram - but I'm not sure how detecting which program 
> > > > is currently in the foreground is best done, especially given screen-managed 
> > > > windows, ssh sessions, etc.
> > > 
> > > Let's answer this last question first.  The best approach would probably 
> > > involve screen content signature. So, given a set of application profile 
> > > specifications, the first item in each profile would describe some 
> > > screen content that has to match for the profile to be activated.  That 
> > > match would need to be reconfirmed whenever the screen content changes, 
> > > and if the match fails then the search for another profile would happen.
> > I wonder what would be some reasonable use-cases for such "profiles".
> > Can't come up with a whole lot off the top of my head. This is the kind
> > of feature more useful for GUIs than consoles usually.
> 
> Heh.  That's probably why BRLTTY has been around for 16 years now 
> without that feature.

If you would see brltty, as its name misleadingly suggests, merely as a
"braille driver for text consoles", it surely could go along without
adding any new features.

Apparently, the people who develop and/or use SBL have missed something.
For me, it was the keyboard-only navigation possibility at that time,
enabling people who can't afford braille devices to access a computer,
to accomplish this just by keyboard and soundcard that every computer
has. Eventually, brltty added that feature later, too, so it seems there
was demand for it. So, why not adopting profiles and self-defined
attribute cursor tracking as well?  ;-)

Regards
-Klaus