While on the home screen, if I hit the N810 keyboard Menu button (bottom left) I get the pull-down menu: Select applets, Applet settings, etc..

How can I add to that menu?

Specifically, what I want to do is put a copy of the Quick-Clip menu that is in the Status bar. The end goal is to be able to enter a Quick Clip note entirely with the keyboard, no stylus required. Adding to the Home menu seems the easiest approach, but I'm open to alternatives. There are a few applications I'd like to be able to start via keyboard rather than on-screen tapping.

I'd appreciate any information on where to start looking,

David...

I think there will be much easier to make a widget for the desktop which will do the same if you press it.
But I am not a developer, so I don't really know

Yeah, I've done desktop shortcuts, etc... the problem is that I'm, well... uptight about using greasy fingers on my "touch screen" device. I automatically pull out the stylus.

I just think it would be easier to pull out the N810, slide out the keyboard, and get into whatever app I wanted with a few easy keystrokes. A terminal session is an ideal candidate for this. What can I say... I'm a keyboard kind of guy. Kind of the reason I have an N810 in the first place.

It's not a big deal, I've just launched myself into a new round of "lets see how perfect I can make this" with a spare N810. The ability to launch apps by keyboard has been a longterm wishlist thing. Figured I'd have a go at it. There must be a way,

David...

Drag lock (to lock desktop widgets) adds itself to that menu. I don't remember if it's a modified hildon-desktop or separate binary that edited the menu. Find it and I can take a look at how it works.

Do you use telescope or stock app menu? Does the app switcher key next to screen open the stock app menu? You could launch the app, if it has one, without touching screen. Unless you have telescope, it can't launch apps without touching screen.

Telescope does however allow the fullscreen and zoom/volume buttons to be bound to commands when the app switch button has been pressed. But first you'd have to figure out how to launch the status bar applet's window from a command. Same applies to launching it from app menu, unless it already has an app in there.

I was reading about Draglock last night, actually. Decided it wasn't a big issue for me... never occurred to me that it puts the menu item there. Good thinking

All I can find on it is here:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=24819&page=2
where the deb files are attachments. So, no source that I can see. Also, in doing a little reading, it sure sounds like it had to be compiled into the hildon desktop files. So, maybe not a quick text file edit as I was originally thinking. Then again, it does more than put in the menu entry.

> Does the app switcher key next to screen open the stock app menu?

Yes, I have telescope installed, though I don't seem to use it regularly. I tried removing it to see if the above works, but no. The buttons do nothing useful when sitting at the home screen. Well, I'm experimenting with ASUI too, and that might be interfering.

Maybe it's time to see if I can clone the sd card that I'm booting off. I'm just thrashing about on a spare N810 to see how far I can push it... too many interesting things on it right now to just throw away and start over. Pretty silly when you don't want to mess up your experimental mess-up device Anyway, I'm having fun. There's a lot of stuff out there that never made it into Extras.


Anyway, doing a grep for "Calibrate screen" (one of the menu items) didn't come up with anything in the home folder or etc. I don't know enough about Hildon to know where else to look...

Now... that's another option I could, um, abscond with whatever the "Calibrate Screen" menu starts, or better yet "Help." I mean, I'm a guy, I never hit the Help button, that's cheating If I could make "Help" start something like Kerez, I'd be close to what I was thinking.

Well, kerez is less keyboard friendly than the hildo home-screen. But, a quick:

sudo mv /usr/bin/osso_help /usr/bin/osso_help_b
sudo cp /usr/bin/roxterm /usr/bin/osso_help

the keyboard sequence:
menu
down (hold or multiple times, doesn't wrap around - sigh)
enter (on the help entry at the bottom)

will open up roxterm, which I have installed. That's a decent way to get into a terminal session. I mean, using keys to get into terminal makes sense. Now, if I can figure out a terminal command to open quick-clip, preferably at entering a message in my journal file, then a short alias would about do it.

It's a bit of an old-school hack, but then so am I

ASUI only uses the top three buttons when audio lock is active. Telescope uses them when it is visible, after pressing the app switch button next to the screen. Edit /etc/telescope.keys:

You can bind any shell commands to those three keys, no need to rename files as you do with osso help.

Interesting... and odd...

I tried mapping the F6 (fullscreen button) to roxterm. I learned 2 things:

1) the key only works as specified if there is an app running for telescope to page. If not, telesope goes to the menu and the key just goes back to the home screen. Oh well, I'll figure out something to map to that. Thanks for the info.

2) vi and roxterm are not good partners... no way to enter esc (opps). Back to osso term. I mean, I've mapped | , [], {}, del, and tab to keys... now I'm going to have to figure out where esc belongs... maybe the centre D button? Then again, I only wanted roxterm because I can set it to start fullscreen... I use it to display the results of some perl scripts. I might just work on starting the osso terminal for regular stuff.

ohhh, more weirdness: copying osso-xterm to osso_help brings up... help??? Okay, doing osso-xterm.launch the same way works. Someday I really should learn what I'm doing

naa... that'll take all the fun out of it

David...

Why not just use xbindkeys for some things? Particularly if you do the trick of mapping Telescope to some ASUI commands, because you can.

Because I didn't know about it
Honestly, I did do quite a bit of searching, and I seem to recall using terms as mentioned in a few links I've now found about xbindkeys, but nothing came up at the time.

Now I know about xbindkeys... works great, exactly what I was looking for, even before I thought about trying to modify the menu. Thank you again. It's in the repos, running xbindkeys -mk allows finding out key combinations, works great. Editing /home/user/.xbindkeysrc works great... now I just have to figure out how to get it to start on reboot.

The /etc/event.d startup file info I could find appears to be N900 specific. I've found a reference to autostart with the N810, but the file structure and commands are a little beyond my current pay grade.

For now, it's no big deal to run up a terminal session and start xbindkeys manually. I don't reboot that often. But, auto-starting an app is on the list of things to figure out so I suppose I'll make that my next challenge, along with those dbus commands to pass parameters to applications being started... Going to take a bit to wrap my head around that stuff too.

Oh, my /home/user/.xbindkeysrc looks like this:
"osso-xterm"
Shift + F4

Very simple. That's all it takes. I suppose I'll add more as ideas come to me. Thanks again for pointing out xbindkeys.

David...