Michael Stapelberg wrote, On 2014-04-14 18:53: > Are you sure that you have neither caps lock nor num lock pressed by > accident? > [...] > Also, maybe try this with a fresh user account, or booting from a live > system? I am pretty sure this is a configuration problem of some sort, > since there are many many i3 users with strange layouts and there were > no bug reports like what you are reporting in the last couple of years.
You're absolutely right. I've created and used a new user, and the problem vanished. So I bisected my configs for something that could interfere with the keyboard layout. Turns out I have "numlockx" in my autostart since ancient times. Removing it sorted out the issue. Thanks for your help and sorry for the noise.
