Inkscape does not react to letter shortkeys

[Hellerick C. Ferlibay]

Since yesterday I work at a computer (Windows 7, the main keyboard layout is Russian) where Inkscape 0.91 was already installed, and I'd noticed no problems with it.

Today I thought that I'm missing some of the 0.92 functions, so I decided to Install it. I expected the installation program to uninstall the 0.91, but it did not happen and I did end up with two versions of Iknscape at the same computer.

Not sure if anything of the above does matter, but here is the deal:

Inkscape does not react to any letter shortcuts. Yes, I know that it normally (and unfortunately) does not react to letter keys when the Russian layout is activated, but this time it does not react to the English layout either. Most digits and the function keys work fine. But when I press Ctrl-O, Ctrl-Shift-F etc. I get no reaction.

When I edit a text, the keys work correctly.

When I press Shift+3, it does not work (which is interesting because in the Russian layout Shift+3 does produce "№" not "#", so it looks like the Inkscape interface stuck with the Russian layout even though the keyboard indicator shows the English layout).

The problem affected both 0.91 and 0.92 versions. I did uninstall both, and re-install the 0.92, but the problem still exists.

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

This sounds like a duplicate of bug #1730246 (and potentially others).

Could you check out comment #2 in the other bug and tell us if this explains the behavior you're seeing?

[Hellerick C. Ferlibay (hellerickferlibay)]

The problem did not disappear after making the US layout primary.

Deleting the Russian layout altogether did help.

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

Did you restart your machine after moving the English layout to the top of the list?
This is required to actually update Windows' internal order (as opposed to only the display order).

[Hellerick C. Ferlibay (hellerickferlibay)]

I did restart. It was not helping.

When I deleted the layout and re-added it, the problem disappeared without a restart.

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

Unless Windows 7 works differently than Windows 10 this does not match my observations so far, so in order to be able to help you'd give more precise information on your keyboard setup and the steps you took.

By deleting and re-adding the layout you probably re-ordered after all...

Either way I just backported the fix I had in mind to a personal branch; testing builds will be available at [1]. Could you check if this version works for you? Obviously it would be ideal if you could reproduce the former (non-working) situation and check if the development build works in this case.

[1] https://ci.appveyor.com/project/Ede123/inkscape/build/0.92.x_shortcuts-429

[Hellerick C. Ferlibay (hellerickferlibay)]

I don't understand what I'm supposed to do at this link.

There is this program installed on this computer: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punto_Switcher

It's popular in Russia. It does analyze the keys you press and guesses which language you type in, and if does not match the current layout it retroactively changes it. I.e. when it notices that you type gibberish which would look more sensible in another layout, it deletes the gibberish and replaces the text it considers correct.

I suspect this Punto Switcher and Inkscape can conflict somehow.

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

> I don't understand what I'm supposed to do at this link.

It's a CI build of 0.92.x
There are two links (one is the 64-bit build the other the 32-bit build). Click the one suitable for you OS, then click "Artifacts" and download the 7z archive (which is a complete build of Inkscape 0.92.x that you can extract anywhere, then run and see if it fixes your issues.

> I suspect this Punto Switcher and Inkscape can conflict somehow.

Well, you should have probably started with this... having software fiddling with keyboard layouts and not mentioning them is not exactly helpful for debugging your issue.
You should check if this software actually changes keyboard layouts in Windows (then it should work) or if it changes key events (i.e. the key a software sees) in wich case it might or might not work...

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

Closing as likely duplicate of bug #1730246 and for lack of feedback.