[Lazarus] Lazarus still not usable with VNC under Raspbian

[Bo Berglund]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 11:05:49 +0200, Joe via Lazarus
<lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:

>on Pi computers under Raspbian controlled over VNC the Lazarus code 
>editor doesn't recognize keystrokes with AltGr and therefore characters 
>like {[]}\ can't be put in. That's a known issue since 2016 
>(https://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=30544#c107874).

In actual fact it is older than this....
I stareted a few threads on this very issue years ago:

2015-10-11: "Lazarus eats comment characters using Swedish keyboard"
2015-10-24: "Clipboard problem with Lazarus using VNC"
2016-02-24: "Keys not recognized by Lazarus 1.6 code editor"

I made extensive tests to narrow down the problem and it condenses to
this:

1) Appears when the Raspberry Pi is accessed via VNC (TightVNC in
these discussions, I never tested RealVNC at the time).
When using the RPi in console mode with a display and keyboard
attached there are no problems at all.

2) Problem: The non-US characters cannot be entered into the Lazarus
code editor window, nothing at all happens when one tries.

3) But in the Lazarus property editor window they arrive just fine!
So Lazarus itself can handle them but the code editor apparently
discards these characters if sent via VNC.

4) In all other editors or other applications I tested that are
bundled with Raspbian there are no problems whatsoever with these
characters. So the characters are properly supplied to the operating
system and should appear inside Lazarus as well, but do no.

5) There is also a clipboard problem, where the copied text needs to
be passed through for example GEdit in order to be possible to paste
into the Lazarus code editor

Since the community was not able to come up with a solution I have had
to use the GEdit trick such that I open a Gedit window in Raspbian and
there I enter the problem characters. Then when I need them in Lazarus
I switch to GEdit, copy the appropriate character and then return to
the Lazarus code editor to paste it in. This works, but is a bit of a
tedious workaround.


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden