Comment 5 for bug 1682020

It is more subtle than suggested by that quote IRC conversation.

The "-k" option isn't marked as deprecated in the QEMU docs because it applies to several different areas of the QEMU code, and it can sometimes be valid to use it (primarily for interacting with QEMU via stdin on the text console. If you are using the VNC server though, it is *strongly* recommended to *NEVER* add the "-k" option, because it will force QEMU to do keymap conversions which are known to be lossy. The result is that users (particularly those with non-US layout keyboards) will be unable to enter certain key combinations. Leave out "-k", and allow VNC clients to pass through raw scan codes directly to the guest without any lossy munging by QEMU.

NB, I am a long term maintainer of the QEMU VNC code & the GTK-VNC client.