939986 - Please add three missing Lithuanian accented letters to the keys (on long press)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::Keyboard, defect)

Description

[Rimas Kudelis [use needinfo to ping]]

When using the default English keyboard layout (QWERTY), long-pressing keys with letters allows me to enter accented forms of these letters.
It would be great if I could enter all Lithuanian characters this way. Request for a separate fully featured Lithuanian keyboard layout will be filed in a separate bug.

The letters currently missing are:

ąĄ ėĖ ųŲ

Comment 1

[Rimas Kudelis [use needinfo to ping]]

Attachment: Github pull request

Comment 2

[Jan Jongboom [:janjongboom] (inactive)]

Comment on attachment 8347792 [details] [review]
Github pull request

Hi Rimas, I don't want to land this in the English keyboard because these characters aren't used in the English language. If you create a Lithuanian keyboard I'd be happy to land that.

Comment 3

[Rimas Kudelis [use needinfo to ping]]

Hi Jan,
I'm tempted to disagree. While it's true that I'm trying to characters outside English alphabet to the US keyboard, it's also true that:
* there is no Lithuanian keyboard layout in Firefox OS yet (cf bug 939991), and English US seems like a sane default for Latin-based languages which don't have a dedicated layout yet.
* the long-press layer of the English layout is already full of non-English (German, French, Czech, Polish etc.) characters. The only difference between these languages and Lithuanian is that the latter is spoken by less people. That would be a valid argument, but then I'd like to know where the line between "let's add these characters" and "no, let's not" is. Otherwise, it looks like the decision is somewhat random.

I wouldn't mind if all (or most of) these accented characters were removed from the US layout altogether, in that case, I wouldn't ask to keep Lithuanian in it either. But as long as it's not being the case, I would like to have a way to enter all symbols of my language.

Comment 4

[Jan Jongboom [:janjongboom] (inactive)]

Rudy, what is our policy here?

Comment 5

[Rudy Lu [:rudyl] (inactive after 2015/7/3)]

The alternative (accented) chars for English was implemented based on UX's design doc,
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aho3t5kX1TtRdFFOS25rZFNXcncxZm9LRUtzaDlKLVE

Rimas,

Thanks for bringing up this layout to improve our language, however I would suggest we create another layout for this, since as you can imagine, we cannot hold every language's accented keys into English, as Bug 940041 shows.

Comment 6

[Rimas Kudelis [use needinfo to ping]]

Rudy, I don't think that spreadsheet answers my question. There's no rationale given why certain characters were or were not chosen in that doc.

Comment 7

[Rimas Kudelis [use needinfo to ping]]

Since this bug is unlikely to ever be accepted, let's just kill it.