Home row mods with key repetition, is it possible?

[magthe]

I'm trying to put modifiers on my home row, but I can't seem to get it to work exactly the way I want it. The behaviour I'm after is something like this

1. a tap on L -> l
2. hold L + A -> C-a
3. hold L -> repeating l

I thought something like this ought to work

l-ctrl (tap-hold-press-timeout 100 100 l rctrl l)

but no matter what I try I never get l-a to produce a C-a.

If I relax my requirements and remove the 3rd item, repeating, then I can use tap-hold-press, but as I do like my vi-bindings I'd really like the keys to repeat when held.

I'm not really sure what else I can try... so any hints would be very welcome.

[jtroo]

I'm assuming you're on Windows, since I can replicate this on Windows. Haven't tested on Linux though. Doing some testing, it seems like there's Windows scheduling issues being hit. Looking at the debug logs with increased time precision, the gap between the 2 OS events reaching kanata is sometimes already greater than 100ms, even though I'm fairly certain I'm physically pressing them within 100ms. I'll see if there's some way to increase the "real-time-ness" of threads.

A workaround for now though would be to increase the time, to e.g. 200ms instead.

[jtroo]

Adding some more investigation notes, I'm not sure how to set priority for the kanata process from within, but starting from PowerShell this works: ($Process = Start-Process ".\target\release\kanata.exe" -ArgumentList "-c testing\tap-hold-press-timeout.kbd" -NoNewWindow -PassThru).PriorityClass = [System.Diagnostics.ProcessPriorityClass]::RealTime

[jtroo]

Ah found the right functions:

        #[cfg(target_os = "windows")]
        unsafe {
            log::info!("Asking Windows to increase process priority");
            winapi::um::processthreadsapi::SetPriorityClass(
                winapi::um::processthreadsapi::GetCurrentProcess(),
                winapi::um::winbase::HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS,
            );
        }

Pushed up to main, hopefully that can improve the situation.

[magthe]

I'm on Linux, not Windows.

I've tried with different times, 100 100 as above, as well as 100 500 and even 100 1000, and I still see the same behaviour.

[jtroo]

Linux doesn't seem to have as much of a scheduling issue as Windows in my testing. Have you mapped all the keys you want to use, and/or added this config:
https://github.com/jtroo/kanata/blob/main/docs/config.adoc#process-unmapped-keys ?

I tested with this configuration and it worked as expected.

(defcfg process-unmapped-keys yes)
(defsrc l)
(deflayer base (tap-hold-press-timeout 100 100 l rctl l))

[magthe]

Yes, with process-unmapped-keys yes it does work. Thanks for all the help.