Keyboard shortcuts do not work in non-Latin layouts

[vanchelosa]

Keyboard shortcuts do not work in non-Latin layouts.

ctrl+c, ctrl+v, ctrl+shift+c, etc. do not work if the layout is not Latin. That is, if a non-English layout is currently selected, then to copy and paste the text, you need to switch the layout to English. Spoils life.

The problem is known and old, but of all the applications, asbru is the only one in which this has not been solved, in all others this behavior has not been seen for a very long time.

Fedora 38, Gnome.

[gfrenoy]

What do you mean with "non-English" layout ? Keyboard layout ? How do you switch the layout to English ?

I'm definitely not using an English keyboard layout and all keyboard shortcuts are working fine so you'll need to be a bit more accurate so that we can improve this...

[vanchelosa]

Yes, I mean the keyboard layout. In my case, I have English and Russian layouts. When the English layout is selected, the hotkeys work, when the Russian one is not. I can't figure out how to explain it... in general, if you select a combination in English in the hotkey settings, then it will be like this:

And if in the Russian layout, then it will be like this:

That is, the keyboard shortcuts are different. I have only two examples with this behavior - vim and asbru-cm, the rest of the applications work correctly.

[gfrenoy]

First, apologies for not being comfortable with Cyrillic languages, this is very new for me but very interesting topic to investigate so thanks for bringing this to my attention :)

So I made some experiments and setup a VM with a similar configuration as yours : two keyboard layouts configured, one in a Latin-language and another other with a Russian layout (the very standard one).

What I observe, indeed is:

• If you use the Latin keyboard layout, all the default shortcuts are working fine
• If you use the Cyrillic keyboard layout, any of the default short works
• If you use the Cyrillic keyboard layout and re-define the shortcut, then the shortcut will work for the Cyrillic keyboard layout but not for the English keyboard anymore
• I tried with Firefox, switch the keyboard layout does not affect the keyboard shortcut
• I also tried with Terminal (a Gtk application) and keyboard shortcuts work the same way, whatever the keyboard layout
• What what interesting with Terminal is that I could change the shortcut and, according to the keyboard layout it has been defined with, it will be displayed differently in the preferences ; but the result is the same : the same key achiever the same action

So my conclusion at this stage of the investigations is that we don't store the key definition the right way. I mean, the "internal code" of the pressed key is probably always the same but what we see (the "human readable" pressed key) must depend on the keyboard settings.

If someone has some interest to continue the investigations, what I suspect is that, in PACKeyBindings.pm, we have to use the "hardware_keycode" (see EventKey) which remains the same, whatever the keyboard layout. A deep re-engineering of PACKeyBindings will be required, not a trivial one, I do fear :worried: