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Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

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Re: Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

#21

Post by toxik »

sdlion wrote: post #13
sleavey wrote: post #3

> For example, on my German layout, / is produced via Shift+7. This is my #1 annoyance with German keyboards as someone who learned a UK layout and who needs to do lots of programming and terminal hacking (#2 is the swapping of Y and Z). I take it this layout was invented before Unix and its heavy use of forward slashes, but it does show how shortcuts are rather discriminatory. I know more than a few Germans who use…

Same problem with latin american keyboards found just a few kilometers south the US. If I remember correctly, the default modifier key in VIM is next to imposible to press on a l-a keyboard. It was ` ?

You mean the default prefix key. You really really don’t need to use prefix keys, like at all, in normal Vim use.

Re: Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

#22

Post by mattnewton »

Joeri wrote: post #15

On a tangent, why are non-qwerty keyboards so poorly designed for programming? And specifically, why is apple’s azerty layout so terrible? Just look at this image: https://i.stack.imgur.com/3LL8a.png Can you find the [ and ] keys? If you’re having trouble, it’s because you have to use 2 (two!) modifier keys and activate the ( or ) keys, which themselves are clumsily placed. This cannot be typed one-handed in a comfor…

I think the answer is that their engineers overwhelmingly use the English layout keyboards and work in Cupertino. Most improvements to coding on a Mac I have seen have a design-for-self element where apple employees are eating their own dog food and want to improve the taste.

Re: Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

#23

Post by [deleted] »

adamzochowski wrote: post #14

There is also a whole slew of issues with Polish characters. Polish keyboard setup relies on "right-alt" and a letter to get it's diacritics variation. Ie: 'ą' is 'right-alt'+a Windows for backwards compatibility reports 'right-alt' as 'alt+control'. Many applications developers assign key combos with no negative checks. So 'ctrl-s', typically used for save gets triggered when user wants to type 'ś'. To repeat, "righ…

[deleted]

Re: Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

#24

Post by samatman »

toxik wrote: post #19
adamzochowski wrote: post #14

There is also a whole slew of issues with Polish characters. Polish keyboard setup relies on "right-alt" and a letter to get it's diacritics variation. Ie: 'ą' is 'right-alt'+a Windows for backwards compatibility reports 'right-alt' as 'alt+control'. Many applications developers assign key combos with no negative checks. So 'ctrl-s', typically used for save gets triggered when user wants to type 'ś'. To repeat, "righ…

Seems easy to fix > Windows for backwards compatibility reports 'right-alt' as 'alt+control'. There’s your problem, right there

No, there are at least two problems here.

An application shouldn't accept ctrl+alt+n as either ctrl+n or alt+n. That is simply a bug, no way around it.

Re: Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

#25

Post by kps »

The root of the problem is what this article correctly describes as the deprecated properties `keyCode` et al. These are essential raw Windows events that browsers in the '90s unwisely decided to expose. For any platform that is not Windows, these have to be emulated, which is not at all simple, since the details vary according to particular Windows keyboard layouts.

Re: Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

#26

Post by adamzochowski »

toxik wrote: post #19
adamzochowski wrote: post #14

There is also a whole slew of issues with Polish characters. Polish keyboard setup relies on "right-alt" and a letter to get it's diacritics variation. Ie: 'ą' is 'right-alt'+a Windows for backwards compatibility reports 'right-alt' as 'alt+control'. Many applications developers assign key combos with no negative checks. So 'ctrl-s', typically used for save gets triggered when user wants to type 'ś'. To repeat, "righ…

Seems easy to fix > Windows for backwards compatibility reports 'right-alt' as 'alt+control'. There’s your problem, right there

The backwards compatibility is for physical keyboards. So that a keyboard with just one alt can still trigger polish letters.

I don't know how other OSes allow for users to trigger "right-alt" when the keyboard has only one alt character.

Re: Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

#27

Post by ynik »

toxik wrote: post #19
adamzochowski wrote: post #14

There is also a whole slew of issues with Polish characters. Polish keyboard setup relies on "right-alt" and a letter to get it's diacritics variation. Ie: 'ą' is 'right-alt'+a Windows for backwards compatibility reports 'right-alt' as 'alt+control'. Many applications developers assign key combos with no negative checks. So 'ctrl-s', typically used for save gets triggered when user wants to type 'ś'. To repeat, "righ…

Seems easy to fix > Windows for backwards compatibility reports 'right-alt' as 'alt+control'. There’s your problem, right there

That also works the other way around -- you can use alt+control instead of right alt.

This may make sense to do with some of the more annoying key combinations, e.g. the German layout requires pressing AltGr+7 for '{'. Both keys individually are usually pressed by the right hand, but pressing the combination with the right hand alone is a very uncomfortable hand position.

Re: Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

#28

Post by j1elo »

As a kid, I remember being utterly confused, when most games with a console would have the key ` to open it. WTF is the key ` and where is it?

For a kid it wasn't that easy to understand that there are such things as different keyboard layouts. Turns out that ` is a single key press to the left of the '1', in English, while it is a bit obscure character to write in other languages. In mine, you have º and ª in that place... so no ` at sight.

But game devs assume that ` is just a keypress away in a confortable area of the keyboard, and it became the de facto way to open in-game consoles. Oh well.

Re: Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

#29

Post by joshuakarl »

I'm french canadian and the most satisfying solution I've found is to keep switching from one keyboard layout to another. I mostly use the american layout when I code, and the french canadian one to communicate. I got used to it in about a week.

Re: Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it

#30

Post by PureParadigm »

It's not just international keyboards that are affected by this. I'm a Dvorak user so I run into these issues from time to time.

As the article explains, there is a difference between the physical keyCode and character it corresponds to. Which to use really depends on what it is being used for, and there are situations for both. The article suggests checking the character typed, but this is not always the correct way to do it.

For instance, the most annoying are games which default to WASD based on the letter typed and not the physical keys (I've seen this both in web app and native games). Using WASD based on letters simply does not make sense because the whole purpose is to mimic arrow keys. If you base it off of letters typed, then on Dvorak it's like if you used ,A;H on Qwerty which makes absolutely no sense for directional navigation.

For shortcuts where the letter has a meaning, then you might want to look at the actual character. But beware that even alphanumeric keys are not always in the same place because of layouts such as Dvorak and Colemak.

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