Subject: bug#79352: 30.2; key release events handling

From: Yurii Pytomets <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2025 05:40:50 +0300

Hello!

It's a feature request.

As a user, I want to be able to set up not only a key press, but a key
release event.

How can it be useful?
- according to Jeff Raskin, modes are evil and so any keyboard
prefixes or modes must be forgotten, since the modifier was released:
don't push the user to track in mind UX-related things principle.
So it's enough to map the (keyboard-quit) on any modifier key release
for the prefix hotkeys.
- it's possible to start the key input repeatedly, e.g. by pressing it
2-3 times and holding it, so repeating action would start immediately
and you would be sure about the speed of repeating: don't force the
user to wait (no timeout required) principle.

How can it be achieved technically?
AFAIK X/Wayland already supports key release events.  For the terminal
version, there's https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/
which AFAIK could manage key release events as well for the compatible
terminals.  So the only thing is to forward that possibility to the
user to let them hook a demanded behavior.

EMACS already is pretty close to having a pretty UX, so let's
incorporate modern keyboard layer abilities to make it perfect!

-- 
With best regards,
Yuriy Pitomets