Notices

All /usr/share/doc and manpages get torched by the apt installer to save space. So even if you had the man command, the manpages themselves are missing.

Would be nice if they did a
or similar so we wouldn't lose all that useful documentation.

Being a busybox based system gets a bit annoying too, because busybox is limited compared to full GNU tools.

But of course you could blow out the Maemo OS and install *any* ARM OS you want, because it's open. Except you can't charge your battery then. That's closed.

Oh, and no ATDT to call people. Maybe someday this will work with the device, but it's likely a ways off:
http://www.ofono.org/

I don't miss man much, but i do miss the usage information and more sophisticated behavior of bash and full utils. Being a lazy man, the tab completion is one of the biggest differences i've noticed.

As jebba says, there are some package manager decisions that limit your ability to use man for apps from the repo, but the rest what you are looking for is probably easier to hack.

I use Mutt to read my mail and Emacs to edit replies, inside a GNU Screen session over SSH, and it quickly becomes apparent that the "X-Terminal" is not a ported app but something new and needs a bit of love, because

- In Mutt, most of the subject lines don't appear because it's ANSI colour processing isn't quite right, so nearly every line from Mutt appears in black on black! Fortunately the currently selected line is visible, so you can sort of read blind, one line visible at a time

- The Enter key does not work! That is, inside Emacs or any application in a Screen session. The Enter key produces an escape sequence, and you have to type Ctrl-J to actually enter anything or get to the next line! It's acting like a numeric keypad Enter, not main keyboard Enter; an unfortunate choice given the way VTs work.

- There's no way to type the ~ (tilde) character, backquote or caret, because the 3rd row of pop-up symbols don't work.

- Even though you can type ], Ctrl-] does not work.

- Shift and BlueArrow are sticky, but Ctrl is not which makes some things a bit harder than necessary and feels annoyingly inconsistent in the X-Terminal, but understandable in other N900 contexts.

- You can type Ctrl-_ (undo in Emacs) and Ctrl-\, but the stickiness of BlueArrow does not stick when doing this, so you have to hold down three keys together.

- Sometimes it gets confused and you can only type Ctrl- keys; non Ctrl- keys don't send anything until you pop-up then dismiss the Sym pop up. This is with the Ctrl on-screen button not highlighted at any time.

Still, we persist. I've used much worse terminals!

heh, thanks for that.. but:

Is this due to screen? Normally, hitting space after one of these 3rd row symbols works. This is because they are "dead" characters, meant to be usable as accents, so that hitting ^ then o will get you a circumflexed o, etc.

Have you tried remapping the kb via the rx-51 file as in threads like these:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...864#post410864

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=35089

?

That's certainly an interesting one. Please let us know if you solve it!

Thanks for that!

It certainly is far from obvious that they are dead keys. Guess the UI designers were on holiday that week!

There's not a hint of a visible clue that it's a row of accent characters or dead keys; half those characters are regular text characters, and there are so many ways to make accenting visibly obvious. Even just a message bar saying "press another key to apply this accent to it", if the graphic designers aren't around to make pretty glyphs

I haven't remapped the keyboard yet. On the whole it's not too bad as it is, except for the strain I'm getting in my right hand, and the uncomfortable feeling that I'm wearing out the Cursor Down key already by scrolling down these long forum pages...

I'm wondering if the two physical keys hiding under the space bar are electrically separate..

Ctrl + i works for me

http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_Shortcuts_and_Gestures

There's been a bug filed about this and it's supposed to be fixed in PR1.1

I meant the behavior of tab completion. It seems to have a few limitations i don't encounter in bash, especially with tildes and such.