On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 8:42 PM, Eli Zaretskii
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:18:27 +0300
> However, if one uses a non-standard keyboard this assumption is
> broken. The 5th key on the first row might send some other key, not a
> `b', which, if you don't tell Emacs about the layout, will be translated
> to some other letter, not Nun.
>
> The way to tell Emacs about the layout of the keyboard is by defining
> it and adding it to quail-keyboard-layout-alist, then set it as the
> current layout using quail-set-keyboard-layout. You can see this in
> the sample code that Kenichi Handa sent.
This assumes that the location of Hebrew letters on the Dvorak
keyboard is exactly the same as on the standard keyboard. But that
assumption is not necessarily true. There's no "standard" for Hebrew
Dvorak keyboard. At least this page:
http://ramalokehrota.blogspot.com/2007/04/russian-and-hebrew-dvorak-for-x11.html
advertises a Dvorak-based layout which moves the Hebrew letters
together with the English ones. E.g., SHIN is still on the same key
as A, LAMED is on K, etc. For this layout, I understand that the
Hebrew input method that comes with Emacs out of the box will work
without any changes.
A very interesting example. I actually went to read the defs, to verify this is really what they do, because initially I could not think of any reason why anyone would actually want to do such a thing...
Next, I noticed he also has a "phonetic Hebrew" keyboard there, and something clicked into place...
Back in the 80's, when I first started typing Hebrew (on the commodore 64 I believe), I was already quite fluent with the qwerty keyboard, but the Hebrew layout was a new thing for me (and I also did not have stickers for the keys). Soon enough I found myself memorizing the (quite random) translation-table (a=ש, s=ד, d=ג...).
This layout might be useful for someone fluent in qwerty, who tries to switch to Dvorak while still in the "learning phase" of the Hebrew layout.
Nevertheless, nowadays, native Hebrew speakers learn to type (with Hebrew layout) before they learn English, so this scenario should be very rare. When you switch to Dvorak, you normally do that to improve your English typing. You do *not* expect the Hebrew positions to change (and if you did, you'd probably want them moved to Hebrew-specific human-engineered positions, not the effectively random ones caused by this shuffling). Hence, the assumptions made by Amit (Hebrew keys should remain in the same position) are far more useful (at least they correspond to what I'd expect).