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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

#61

Post by totetsu »

opan wrote: post #48
PureParadigm wrote: post #30

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…

I've used dvorak and now workman and I don't mind the shortcuts moving around. The biggest annoyance for me is if you want to sometimes use hardware-level dvorak or another layout (which expects software-level qwerty) and sometimes use it in software. Like, if your keyboard runs QMK but you use it with a laptop and might want to use the laptop's built-in keyboard if you take it on the go. GTK also has some weird issu…

Does windows a way to simultaneously use different layouts for different connected devices? It's really annoying shifting between my Japanese USB keyboard and English laptop. In Ubuntu I had startup script to detect input devices IDs by name and force different layouts, but even that was a bit of a hack.

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

#62

Post by jameshart »

smnrchrds wrote: post #41
MattGaiser wrote: post #7

> What baffles me is that the problem exists in apps used by millions of people every day, developed by gigantic corporations who pride themselves with having the best engineers in the world. Why is this baffling? Because the underlying technical issues are rather trivial! > Hint for developers: Switch your computer’s keyboard layout to something other than US to debug your application’s shortcut handling on differen…

For a 10-person startup, that's fair. For a company like Google , with offices in Germany and France and hundreds of engineers from any nationality, not so much. Other companies fall somewhere in between based on their headcount and global reach.

Big companies aren’t huge for the sake of being huge. They employ so many people because they have so much work to do.

They still employ as few people as they can get away with.

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

#63

Post by gerdesj »

j1elo wrote: post #28

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 p…

We all suffer from character blindness of some sort. For you: ` - that thing isn't formally defined in English either as far as I know.

In English we don't have any diacritics. We do have a few extra symbols, beyond the alphabet for certain situations. Quotations ... " ... meh should be 66 99 and that will be fixed up by DTP software. We use ' to denote a dropped letter - abbreviation. There are a few others. I won't dwell on "thorne" and ligatures and other oddities.

I do not know of any reason to write ` - it is not an apostrophe, which is: '. What is it?

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

#64

Post by salamandersauce »

jakear wrote: post #56
layer8 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was a standard way to define hotkey bindings, a simple linter could take care of that. It just shows how far we still have to go in terms of good UI creation tooling.

This is part of why I’d like to see more VSCode-as-an-OS (disclaimer work on VSCode)... imagine writing only the code to go from bytes on disk => view and back, and getting for free: version control, command palette, keybindings, Windows/Mac/Linux/Web support, file explorer, tabs, split views, hot exit, etc etc etc.

We already have a perfectly good OS that does all that. It's called Emacs.

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

#65

Post by numpad0 »

Havoc wrote: post #20

Also while we're at it...fix this for bitlocker. Makes special characters in passwords a nightmare and you need to memorize where that stupid character is...

It’s unwise anyway to use letters outside of a-Z0-9 in a password unless absolutely necessary

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

#66

Post by runarberg »

rmetzler wrote: post #32
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…

It's the other way around. The keyboard was the foundation for the programming languages and shortcuts, like moving with hjkl in vim. No German keyboard user would have created a language like C with curly braces, when you would break your fingers typing this (alt 8 is {, alt 9 is }, and alt+5 is [, alt+6 is ] ). I use a US keyboard for that exact reason

I reassign my Caps lock key as a third level modifier. That way I can type { with Caps Lock + 7. Caps lock is so large I can comfortably use my pinky and ring finger to press and hold it, while I use my right hand to press 7, 8, 9 or 0 for {, [, ], } respectively.

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

#67

Post by remexre »

gerdesj wrote: post #63
j1elo wrote: post #28

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 p…

We all suffer from character blindness of some sort. For you: ` - that thing isn't formally defined in English either as far as I know. In English we don't have any diacritics. We do have a few extra symbols, beyond the alphabet for certain situations. Quotations ... " ... meh should be 66 99 and that will be fixed up by DTP software. We use ' to denote a dropped letter - abbreviation. There are a few others. I won't…

I think back in the day (typewriters thru... 90s?) you wrote quoted text `like this.'

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

#68

Post by numpad0 »

totetsu wrote: post #61
opan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used dvorak and now workman and I don't mind the shortcuts moving around. The biggest annoyance for me is if you want to sometimes use hardware-level dvorak or another layout (which expects software-level qwerty) and sometimes use it in software. Like, if your keyboard runs QMK but you use it with a laptop and might want to use the laptop's built-in keyboard if you take it on the go. GTK also has some weird issu…

Does windows a way to simultaneously use different layouts for different connected devices? It's really annoying shifting between my Japanese USB keyboard and English laptop. In Ubuntu I had startup script to detect input devices IDs by name and force different layouts, but even that was a bit of a hack.

Judging by the comments here, looks like we’re globally a rare breed that want absolute priority for keytop labeling over software configuration items.

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

#70

Post by wott »

slightwinder wrote: post #53
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…

Most keyboard-layouts predate programming-languages, because they were designed for typewrites decades before the first modern computers even existed. So there did gave much to usage of special chara back then. Additionally most languages were designed by americans, on US-layout, which had a great impact on usages of different char in our digital world. Like for example the usage of @, which AFAIK was only used for e…

> Like for example the usage of @, which AFAIK was only used for e-mail because there was no other free char on the developers keyboard available.

'@' meant 'at' looong before e-mail was invented.

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