cannot search text beginning with Alt(-gr) special character

[Viili]

background:
gedit 3.4.1-0ubuntu1
ubuntu 12.04

1. Open text file with Gedit
2. Hit CTRL-F to search
3. try to give i.e. "@deco" with finnish keyboard where the character '@' comes from key combination AltGr + 2
expected: can enter text starting with special characters to search with into the search box
result: search box closes when pressing Alt -> and typing the text that was intended for the search box ends up in the document itself.
workaround: copy-paste the search string into search box

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, I can't confirm that on trusty though (nor on older versions, using a french keyboard)

[teo1978 (teo8976)]

I can confirm the exact same behavior on Ubuntu 14.04 with a Spanish keyboard. I'm not sure whether it's systematic or intermittent, since I think I rarely search for such characters, and I hadn't observed this until now.

I've observed a similar but INTERMITTENT behavior on both Chrome and Firefox with some particular webpages with javascript, where hitting the Alt Gr key resulted in loosing the focus from the input field being edited. I always thought that was a bug in the javascript code of those web pages. Now I dubt this is may be the same issue than in Gedit and be a general problem in Ubuntu. If it is, then it is intermittent and apparently random (but when it starts happening it will keep happening until, I don't know, a reboot or something).

Please reconsider importance (whether or not this is gedit only)

[teo1978 (teo8976)]

I can confirm my previous content:

- the issue is intermittent
- when and only when I'm observing it in Gedit, I'm also observing it in Chrome and Firefox (*)
- suspending+resuming, and rebooting, seems to be what, at random times, fixes the issue or makes it reappear.

(*) I can't provide an URL to test the issue on browsers. It's a private page with restricted access with javascript that does the following: when you double click on a text it converts it into an input text field, and when you hit Enter or remove focus from it, it saves changes and the input field is replaced by plain text again. WHEN the issue is present, hitting AltGr has the same effect than hitting Enter or Esc or clicking away. When the issue is not present, everything works as expected and I can type @, #, etc. Exactly the same as in Gedit.

So:
** this is NOT IN GEDIT, it's much more general, though I have no idea what the correct package is.
** Importance should be raised to HIGH OR CRITICAL. This issue means randomly being randomly unable to type and edit text in several contexts.

While the number of affected users may be small, the impact is disastrous. It matches both these criteria:
(critical) Severely affects applications beyond the package responsible for the root cause
(major) Renders essential features or functionality of the application or dependencies broken or ineffective

[Lars (eudaimonia)]

I can confirm this bug in 14.04 with a german keyboard. In my case it only effects gedit. The search field closes by pressing alt or alt gr therefore nothing can be entered in the search box based on those keys. The solution to copy paste is not practicable for me since I search many [... or @... strings.
A solution could be to leave the searchbox open even when clicking on a menu entry (which is another thing that closes the searchbox, but I guess that was initially intended.

[Markus (markusmindf)]

This affects me, too. I just wanted to find a backslash, and other characters that wouldn't work are {}[]~| on german keyboards.

[Me (mayerchristel)]

Now that it is confirmed please set an importance based on reality. And please somebody find the package and tell someone to fix it, it's completely annoying.

[Lukas Pietsch (lukas-pietsch)]

I have this problem in the Gedit searchbox too, in Ubuntu 16.04 / Gedit 3.18.3, and not merely with AltGr-combinations but even with Shift (uppercase) keys. I can also confirm that the same is happening in input fields in certain websites on Firefox.

Gedit gives an error message on stderr every time this happens:
** (gedit:29772): WARNING **: (gedit/gedit-view-frame.c:121):get_iter_at_start_mark: code should not be reached

[Lukas Pietsch (lukas-pietsch)]

Update: It seems this has something to do with the hotkeys used by Ubuntu/fcitx for switching between keyboard layouts. I had a keyboard-switching hotkey involving a Shift combination, and as long as that was active, the error occurred. Now I've changed the hotkey to something else and the error seems to be gone.