I would like to draw your attention to one old and annoying XKB bug,
which has been fixed by a patch few months ago. Although this patch
seems to provide a reasonable solution for the problem, and several
people reported it worked for them without any side-effects, it wasn't
accepted upstream. The answer from Xorg developer was, that such a
behavior would contradict the spec and the issue probably will be fixed
with a new spec for XKB2. Unfortunately, the latter sounds like "when
pigs fly"... It's also worth mentioning, that corresponding bug in Xorg
bugzilla was filed 6 (!) years ago, with no notable progress until
recently, and even now when patch is available it has been not applied
upstream.
Now brief summary of the problem.
Issue: If KB layout switching is used, any keyboard shortcuts involving
keys from key combination used for switching don't work any more.
Example: If Ctrl+Shift used as layout switching shortcut (most common
case), then Ctrl+Shift+T shortcut doesn't work in Firefox, as well as
other Ctrl+Shift+<Key> shortcuts in all other programs.
Cause: It turned out, that layout switching occurs on KEY DOWN event,
thus preventing all further keys in a shortcut from being processed.
Fix: The patch provides simple and obvious solution: switching occurs on
KEY RELEASE event, which means, it will be fired only if eg Ctrl+Shift
ALONE were pressed.
Importance: It could happen, that Xorg developers who themselves use
only 1 US layout, just do not understand how serious the problem is.
Because of this bug, quite wide range of shortcuts is not accessible in
ALL applications system-wide. And since almost all people outside
English-speaking countries use multiple layouts (national + English for
web addresses, programming etc), the number of affected users is also
significant.
What makes things even worse, is the fact, that it's not quite a priori
obvious, that layout switching causes the problem. So typically user
notices, that some shortcuts are not working in some particular
application, and will be searching for solution for this specific
problem - and will most probably find nothing. So did I, googled without
any success, and only after some experiments later I've figured out,
that layout switching is actually to blame.
So it's a big time-loss and annoyance for all newcomers, who need to
reinvent the wheel by themselves.
That's why discussing this bug on Launchpad, we came to the following
suggestion: Would it be possible to include this patch in standard
Ubuntu Xorg distribution, thus saving all international users much
efforts?
It would definitely make Ubuntu distro even more user-friendly :)
You can find full discussion and further details as well as the patch
itself here:
Hello X-SWAT team!
I would like to draw your attention to one old and annoying XKB bug,
which has been fixed by a patch few months ago. Although this patch
seems to provide a reasonable solution for the problem, and several
people reported it worked for them without any side-effects, it wasn't
accepted upstream. The answer from Xorg developer was, that such a
behavior would contradict the spec and the issue probably will be fixed
with a new spec for XKB2. Unfortunately, the latter sounds like "when
pigs fly"... It's also worth mentioning, that corresponding bug in Xorg
bugzilla was filed 6 (!) years ago, with no notable progress until
recently, and even now when patch is available it has been not applied
upstream.
Now brief summary of the problem.
Issue: If KB layout switching is used, any keyboard shortcuts involving
keys from key combination used for switching don't work any more.
Example: If Ctrl+Shift used as layout switching shortcut (most common
case), then Ctrl+Shift+T shortcut doesn't work in Firefox, as well as
other Ctrl+Shift+<Key> shortcuts in all other programs.
Cause: It turned out, that layout switching occurs on KEY DOWN event,
thus preventing all further keys in a shortcut from being processed.
Fix: The patch provides simple and obvious solution: switching occurs on
KEY RELEASE event, which means, it will be fired only if eg Ctrl+Shift
ALONE were pressed.
Importance: It could happen, that Xorg developers who themselves use
only 1 US layout, just do not understand how serious the problem is.
Because of this bug, quite wide range of shortcuts is not accessible in
ALL applications system-wide. And since almost all people outside
English-speaking countries use multiple layouts (national + English for
web addresses, programming etc), the number of affected users is also
significant.
What makes things even worse, is the fact, that it's not quite a priori
obvious, that layout switching causes the problem. So typically user
notices, that some shortcuts are not working in some particular
application, and will be searching for solution for this specific
problem - and will most probably find nothing. So did I, googled without
any success, and only after some experiments later I've figured out,
that layout switching is actually to blame.
So it's a big time-loss and annoyance for all newcomers, who need to
reinvent the wheel by themselves.
That's why discussing this bug on Launchpad, we came to the following
suggestion: Would it be possible to include this patch in standard
Ubuntu Xorg distribution, thus saving all international users much
efforts?
It would definitely make Ubuntu distro even more user-friendly :)
You can find full discussion and further details as well as the patch
itself here:
https:/ /bugs.launchpad .net/xorg- server/ +bug/36812
Bug filed in Freedesktop bugzilla:
http:// bugs.freedeskto p.org/show_ bug.cgi? id=865
Many thanks in advance and hope for your collaboration.
Best regards,
Alexey Kozlov