[snap] [' + c] produces "ć" instead of "ç" with US intl. layout

[Andreas Hasenack]

Since I upgraded to impish, firefox is the only application on my desktop which produces "ć" instead of "ç" when I enter the combination "'" + "c". I suspect it's because now it's a snap, and is not respecting some system-wide configuration.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. Which desktop environment, locale and keyboard layout are you using?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

also doing ''' and then 'c' on my laptop does write 'c, are you using some compose key?

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

gnome, wayland, us international is the keyboard layout, locale is:

andreas@nsnx:~$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_TIME=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_NAME=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=pt_BR.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

No compose. And it's just firefox that is the outlier, and it was working before the upgrade to impish (was on hirsute before).
Apps where ' + c produce ç (just going over the list of graphical apps that I use most often):
- xchat
- chrome
- chromium (which is also a snap, btw)
- terminator
- gnome-terminal
- virt-manager
- vscode

Note it's a bug as old as linux almost: if you google, you will find Brazilians complaining about ' + c NOT producing ç since the early days, and tons of workarounds and solutions. Every now and then, it resurfaces.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Thanks for the report Andreas.

I'm not familiar with the US intl. layout, but I changed to it on my impish desktop, and I'm consistently getting "ć" in all applications I tested for [´ + c]. I googled around a bit (admittedly not very long) and found this answer (https://askubuntu.com/a/599538) that suggests that the correct key combination for "ç" is [AltGr + , + c], and that [´ + c] really is an acute accent on top of a "c", i.e. "ć".

Not sure how much truth there is in this (as I said I have no prior experience or knowledge on the topic), but it does seem to make sense to me.

That probably doesn't help if all other apps are behaving differently though, so some investigation is needed to understand why.

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

As I said, it's a beef that brazilians have with the us international layout since life began. We don't like having to use altgr + ,. Eventually the ~200milion population won the debate, and MacOS uses '+c, Windows uses '+c, and Ubuntu used to use '+c. Note this is probably only for pt_BR (those 200 million people), pt_PT and others probably settled on ' + c producing ć.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Thanks for the insights Andreas. The firefox snap is built on core20 (Ubuntu 20.04) and uses the gnome-3-38-2004 content snap, which provides a whole bunch of base libraries, some of them from the Ubuntu 20.04 archive, others built from source.

The problem could very well be caused by an incompatibility in this stack of components, or by a missing Ubuntu-specific patch in one of the libs built from source.

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

Now with Jammy 22.04, I have no choice and firefox is forcibly a snap and the ć problem continues. It works fine in chrome, and the firefox binary tarball downloaded from https://getfirefox.com.

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

It's a big joke for Brazillian users when somebody types ć: "oh, so you are using linux? They still didn't fix that? :D"

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

it seems a snap issue indeed, it's still there in core22 (tried with gnome-calculator). One workaround is to GTK_IM_MODULE= firefox

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

> One workaround is to GTK_IM_MODULE= firefox

Did you mean GTK_IM_MODULE=cedilla ?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Want to mention that the language-selector-common package installs the file /etc/profile.d/cedilla-portuguese.sh with the purpose to make '+c result in ç when the region is set to a Portuguese locale. That file ought to be the reason why LC_CTYPE is "pt_BR.UTF-8" as mentioned in comment #3.

But it does not work for me anywhere when testing now in jammy and mantic. Not sure why.