Keyboard layout switching problem

[Dotan Cohen]

On 21/02/07, Dmitrij Ilchenko <idtest at gmail.com> wrote:
> The only reason is that i've got used to Ctrl+Shift switching already
> and I had it worked in Debian, so i see no reason why it shouldn't
> work in Ubuntu. Internal keyboard switcher of KDE doesn't offer a
> Ctrl+Shift combination,

Yes it does. And even if not, you can custom define it.

> and in Gnome when i enabled keyboar switcher
> applet - you know what i've got....

No I don't. I don't use Gnome.

> No matter what do I use -
> KDE/Gnome/Xfce/IceWM - they are all X Window Systems. So, they "obey"
> to a config of X server (Xorg here in Ubuntu), so the layouts should
> switch as specified in X config, if not overwritten by internal
> application. Am i wrong somewhere?

It's no longer all at the X level rather at the application level. I'm
no CS major so if someone could step in and clear up some facts I'd
appreciate it. Here's what I know: KDE can, at it's own level,
interpret keystrokes and insert the Hebrew/Russian charatcer as
desired. X doesn't even know that you've switched layouts. And some
applications, that are not KDE based, might not work as expected.
Firefox is a good example. In gnome, Hebrew keyboard shortcuts work as
expected in GTK most GTK apps. Firefox, despite being GTK, does not
recognize Hebrew keyboard shortcuts. It's an application bug.

> So, again. The topic is - i want to get Ctrl+Shift switching of
> keyboard layouts work. It doesn't. Why?

Because you're tying to do it with X. Set it in KDE/Gnome and see what happens.

> About your side note - i've met the same problem... especcially
> painful when using ICQ, as for me. But really in this case I only know
> 2 solutions:
> 1) get used that if you're in Hebrew, the program won't do the "paste"
> action if you press Ctrl+V :(;
> 2) setup something like xneur or internal applets of desktop
> environments to track layouts in different windows separately, so if
> you switched to OpenOffice and written something in Hebrew copied it
> somehow, then swithced back to mail client where you had English
> turned on, and pasted it by pressing Ctrl+V, it will paste :) As i
> know, xneur works both in gnome and KDE, and internal Gnome applet has
> a feature of "remember layouts of every window"

In gnome apps the shortcuts work as expected, so I'll file a bug at KDE.

Dotan Cohen

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