Use international keys for keybindings

[MartiniMoe]

Hey there :)

Is it possible to use international keys for the keybindings.yml? Like for example the german "Umlaute" Ä, Ö and Ü? As far as I understand the usage of the gio library in sointu, this is not possible, because those keys do not have a "Name", is that right? Is there some way to map these?

Thanks and best regards :)
Moe

[vsariola]

I'm afraid it is not, at least looking at Gio source. Looking at how Gio converts OS-specific key codes into Gio key codes, for example on Windows, I see code like this:

https://github.com/gioui/gio/blob/be8d9df84894457c3ceca7f69611641d13ccb8cd/app/os_windows.go#L255

and

https://github.com/gioui/gio/blob/be8d9df84894457c3ceca7f69611641d13ccb8cd/app/os_windows.go#L904

In the latter part, you see that if the key is not between 0 ..9 and A .. Z OR one of the very specific exceptions, it is not passed forward.

The key.Name is really just a string, so I don't see why they could not pass through the unrecognized key codes just as they are. You can check the os_XXX.go files how your platforms handles it. We could file a feature request to Gio, if we have some good suggestion how to handle it; they are usually quite receptive and if we get something merged there, I am happy to update Sointu to use that Gio version.

[MartiniMoe]

Thanks a lot for the fast response :)

For reference: I was also asking in the gio repo here: https://todo.sr.ht/~eliasnaur/gio/675

As I am not that much of a developer myself, I do not feel confident in developing a good idea on how to handle this. But maybe for example one way could be, to be able to handle keycodes instead of names? But I don't really know 🥲

[vsariola]

Hey, I am probably speaking BS, I think they just come through as their U.S. keyboard equivalents?

At least on Windows, on my Finnish keyboard

• Windows sees Ö as VK_OEM_3, and based on this line, it comes through as `
• Windows sees Ä as VK_OEM_7, and based on this line, it comes through as '

With Linux and German keyboard layout, things might work a bit differently, but I see that all keys with codes between 32 (ascii space) and 126 (ascii tilde) are just passed forward.

Maybe just change to English keyboard layout and see what Ä, Ö and Ü appear as when typing anywhere? They are likely called exactly that by Gio, I think? Then add these to your custom keybindings.yml.

If you are still uncertain what they come through as, you can put a breakpoint in tracker.go here:

And inspect the event you get:

If no event comes through then we really need to hack Gio :(

[MartiniMoe]

I just finally tried it with debugging.
I put a breakpoint at the line you mentioned and could get the KeyEvent for other keys, but it would not stop at the breakpoint, when pressing one of Ü,Ö,Ä 😢

// For reference:
In the issue I opened in the gio repository, the author asked Why not add labels for the missing keycodes?, so maybe that would somehow be possible and fix this issue? 😅

/// Oh and just as a quick FYI: sointu-track works flawlessly even with Linux on an ARM board ❤️

[vsariola]

Snif. Can you patch gioui :))) You can clone gioui to a folder and use replace gioui.org => /relative/path/to/local/copy/of/gioui in the sointu go.mod to dig deeper

[vsariola]

The understanding was that you need to add a name for ö ä ü to get the events come through, somewhere in here https://github.com/gioui/gio/blob/93419a77bdbe4eef3f8ce33dd1ce74697ca62ad7/app/internal/xkb/xkb_unix.go#L248

[vsariola]

Argh misclicking on mobile