Hello X-SWAT team! I would like to draw your attention to one old and annoying XKB bug, which has been fixed by a patch few months ago. Although this patch seems to provide a reasonable solution for the problem, and several people reported it worked for them without any side-effects, it wasn't accepted upstream. The answer from Xorg developer was, that such a behavior would contradict the spec and the issue probably will be fixed with a new spec for XKB2. Unfortunately, the latter sounds like "when pigs fly"... It's also worth mentioning, that corresponding bug in Xorg bugzilla was filed 6 (!) years ago, with no notable progress until recently, and even now when patch is available it has been not applied upstream.
Now brief summary of the problem. Issue: If KB layout switching is used, any keyboard shortcuts involving keys from key combination used for switching don't work any more. Example: If Ctrl+Shift used as layout switching shortcut (most common case), then Ctrl+Shift+T shortcut doesn't work in Firefox, as well as other Ctrl+Shift+<Key> shortcuts in all other programs. Cause: It turned out, that layout switching occurs on KEY DOWN event, thus preventing all further keys in a shortcut from being processed. Fix: The patch provides simple and obvious solution: switching occurs on KEY RELEASE event, which means, it will be fired only if eg Ctrl+Shift ALONE were pressed. Importance: It could happen, that Xorg developers who themselves use only 1 US layout, just do not understand how serious the problem is. Because of this bug, quite wide range of shortcuts is not accessible in ALL applications system-wide. And since almost all people outside English-speaking countries use multiple layouts (national + English for web addresses, programming etc), the number of affected users is also significant. What makes things even worse, is the fact, that it's not quite a priori obvious, that layout switching causes the problem. So typically user notices, that some shortcuts are not working in some particular application, and will be searching for solution for this specific problem - and will most probably find nothing. So did I, googled without any success, and only after some experiments later I've figured out, that layout switching is actually to blame. So it's a big time-loss and annoyance for all newcomers, who need to reinvent the wheel by themselves. That's why discussing this bug on Launchpad, we came to the following suggestion: Would it be possible to include this patch in standard Ubuntu Xorg distribution, thus saving all international users much efforts? It would definitely make Ubuntu distro even more user-friendly :) You can find full discussion and further details as well as the patch itself here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/xorg-server/+bug/36812 Bug filed in Freedesktop bugzilla: http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=865 Many thanks in advance and hope for your collaboration. Best regards, Alexey Kozlov -- Keyboard layout change on hotkeys press instead of release and do not work well with shortcuts https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/36812 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is a direct subscriber. -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
