[Feature] Variables

[TTWNO]

During the development of the Odilia screen reader we have run into a fairly specific use-case.
A screen reader usually works using the capslock key as the "screen reader modifier"; this is fairly standard, but doesn't work very well in the accessibility and general Linux space due to custom keyboards, bindings, etc. not to mention that some people just prefer using a different key as their SR modifier.
It is important to remember that the SR modifier needs to be bound for every screen reader function; this can be upwards of 100 keybindings.

If it would be at all possible, could there be a way to set a variable key like so:

$odilia_key = capslock
...
$odilia_key + k
    @odilia {JSON OBJECT HERE}

Then changing the key would be fairly straightforward; as of now, the user would need to do a find+replace on the entire file and hope that the string "capslock" doesn't show up anywhere.

Is this something you would consider supporting or should this be done in our fork?

[ajanon]

Thanks for the idea!

This seems similar to #117 to me (with a slightly different use case). What do you think?

I am personally not too hyped by the prospect of supporting variables in the config, as I believe this would create many edge cases and weird (mis)uses. As is, I do not think I have strong technical arguments against this feature.
In addition, supporting this use case could also help in solving #103 by allowing users to choose any key as a modifier (but this may create other issues, as you mention in #166 for instance).

I believe we should try to have a proper grammar and improve the config parser (as mentioned in #164) before implementing something like this.

@Shinyzenith @EdenQwQ @angelofallars what do you think?

[Shinyzenith]

I think I agree with @ajanon in the sense that we should improve our lexical parsing before attempting this to make sure we cover most of the edge cases. Apart from that I think this would be a fine feature to add but annoying to code in 🤣. Sorry for the late reply, I've been super busy with university lately.