Dash - Should deal with wrong keyboard layouts

[Ivan Surzhenko]

Hello,

I have a feature request. I think all non-English people will agree with me.

Idea: Use all defined key layouts (in the user preferences) when user tries to search. For example, if English and Russian are defined as languages for typing and user has wrote "vtytl;th" then try to search for "менеджер" too (it is "manager" in English, so people may mean "Update Manager" or something like this).

Why: It is a very usefull feature for the non-english people because they often use a wrong keylayout (at first chance). For today, they should erase the wrong word and write again with the valid keylayout. First of all, it is a very usefull feature for users who has English as the default layout.

Let me know if you have any questions.

--
Thanks,
Ivan Surzhenko

[Ivan Surzhenko (i-surzhenko)]

Also,

I can try to coding something for that (i am a developer).

But i need someone who can help me with the startup (development process, documenting, etc).

--
Thanks,
Ivan Surzhenko

[John Lea (johnlea)]

@i-surzhenko; great idea, thanks for the bug report. Also thank you for your offer of coding this, for some advice on the best place to start go to #ubuntu-unity on the 'Freenode' IRC channel and try asking mhr3 , kamstrup, or njpatel

good luck!

thanks,
John

[Michal Hruby (mhr3)]

Not exactly what the report is about, but we do support transliteration - so searching for "menedzer" should return the same results as a search for "менеджер".

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Is what you describe working on any other OS? Would you see that working only cross alphabets like in your example, or taking the case of an english user typing on a german keyboard would i.e typing "öovie" match "movie" (assuming the "ö" and the "m" are inverted on that layout)?

[Ori Hoch (ori-uumpa)]

There is an option in Keyboard Layout settings that can partially fix it - If you choose "Allow different layouts for individual windows" then the dash can always be in english (for starting programs) and will stay in english even if different applications are in other keyboard layouts. But there is still a problem if you want to search files in the dash and switch to another keyboard layout.

From what I saw in Windows 7 - the default option is for different layouts for individual windows and I couldn't see a way to change that. I think it might be a more sensible default for ubuntu too because otherwise windows users might get frustrated from the ubuntu default behaviour.

In google search they do have the expected behaviour, for example, the following is a search for "testing keyboard layout problem" but typing in hebrew keyboard layout:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%D7%90%D7%A7%D7%93%D7%90%D7%9F%D7%9E%D7%A2%20%D7%9C%D7%A7%D7%98%D7%A0%D7%9D%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%92%20%D7%9A%D7%A9%D7%98%D7%9D%D7%95%D7%90%20%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%9D%D7%A0%D7%9A%D7%A7%D7%A6
google detects the wrong keyboard layout and shows result for the english layout.

Google might do it using their language translation servers which might not be feasible for unity but I think it can be done using the user's keyboard layouts. Something like this:

* User does a search in unity's dash - if there are no results (or maybe even if there are results?)
* dash loops over the user's other keyboard layouts
* for each layout - converts the search term to that layout
* search using that layout - if there are results for a layout - show the results (or add to existing results)