jahorton
commented
4 months ago I thought I'd found a repro for this last night, but it turned out to be due to a different behavior - modipress isn't holding consistently, with the layer dropping back while I'm still holding a modifier key. Interestingly... I don't see the same behavior when using the Web testing pages on iOS Safari, outside of the app + system-keyboard. Everything feels butter-smooth for non-embedded gestures - it's when they're embedded that we're seeing the issue.
While noting this distinction, I remembered something that has a chance of relevance for this problem. Way back in the past, with #2959, we changed the iOS keyboard engine to use the Web-based subkey menu. At the time, we hoped that what we saw as a bug would be fixed and that we'd be able to reverse the decision. You see, that bug was blocking users' ability to select longpress subkeys... because gesture handlers on the Swift side for the WebView were actually being affected by the return value provided by JS-side event handlers - something we certainly didn't expect.
A lot has changed since then, and we're now fully committed to handling all keyboard gestures fully on the JS side, within the WebView. We also never saw a bug fix go through for the issue we reported. Remembering that we've seen interaction between gesture-handlers in Swift and those within the WebView before... is it possible that the gesture issues we're seeing now are due to the Swift-side handlers we left in place? Could those be conflicting?
Describe the bug
While I haven't yet noted any consistent patterns that would trigger the issue, during use of the system keyboard on iOS on my personal device, the keyboard has occasionally gone completely unresponsive to flicks.
When this triggers, multitap on shift (for caps) still works fine, as does longpress. Even modipress is fine - just not flicks. Any and all flicks, however, are completely ignored until the keyboard is swapped or reselected from the globe-key menu. (Just re-selecting the active keyboard is enough.) Longpress up-flick shortcutting does not appear to trigger in this state either - only the timer component seems operable then. Layer-changing is not enough to trigger a reset - the keyboard itself must be reset. (Layer changing itself still works, to be clear.)
After checking within Sentry for potentially-related error reports near the time of the observed error, nothing even closely related could be found.
Reproduce the bug
No currently-known repro exists. It generally happens when I start using flicks frequently in succession, I think? But it triggers sporadically and randomly for me, and I haven't been able to narrow down a cause yet. I usuallly reset, then re-attempt whatever I was doing whenever it triggers, but doing so has never retriggered the issue for me.
If and when #11229 goes through, I should be able to use webview-inspection to get more insight.
Also of note: I don't recall ever having recently changed layers whenever it triggered. The most recent instance had certainly been at least 7 keystrokes after the most recent layer change, if not considerably more. (I wasn't exactly counting at the time.) I had not recently used a modipress input, either.
Expected behavior
No response
Related issues
No response
Keyman apps
Keyman version
17.0.321-beta, other previous versions. Should also trigger on 17.0.326.
Operating system
iOS
Device
iPhone SE 2
Target application
any
Browser
No response
Keyboard name
No response
Keyboard version
No response
Language name
No response
Additional context
No response