[Lazarus] Keys not recognized by Lazarus 1.6 code editor

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> On 2016-02-24 13:10, Bo Berglund wrote:
>> I have discovered a strange problem with my Lazarus 1.6 release
>> installation on RPi2 (Raspbian Jessie) concerning keyboard entries.
> 
> I don't believe that is a new issue in Lazarus though, and not limited
> to only VNC connections. For years I've had issues where if I changed my
> keyboard layout of X11 via xmodmap, while Lazarus was running, then all
> (most) keyboard input in Lazarus is screwed. Other running applications
> continue to work fine, but Lazarus not. I have to close Lazarus down and
> start it up again before keyboard input works correctly.
> 
> I don't know if this relates to VNC, but it might - as VNC (and RDP) can
> do keyboard translations on the fly. eg: Me running Dvorak locally,
> connecting to a system that has Qwerty setup. VNC and RDP automatically
> makes the keystrokes for me, without me having to change the keyboard
> layout of the remotely system.

VNC- both the standard xvnc4viewer and krdc as an alternative- has 
problems with some character mappings and combinations. This has long 
been an irritiation to me with both Delphi (on Windows) and Lazarus (on 
Linux or Solaris) since on occasion I've wanted to use a doubleclick 
plus two shift keys to get into a special "maven mode" for debugging 
etc., some combinations quite simply don't work with VNC while they're 
fine with e.g. X11 tunnelled over SSH.

I don't see that as necessarily being a Lazarus problem, but Bo's 
observation that simple text entry fields behave differently from the 
IDE editor- possibly because they don't have hooks for CodeTools etc.- 
is arguably a bug and perhaps should be raised as such on Mantis.

I think that your (Graeme) point about Dvorak etc. keyboards is really 
down to what software converts the keyboard (scan) codes into internal 
X11 codes. I had to dig around a little a few weeks ago when I needed to 
simulate a "Windows" key on a keyboard that didn't have one, but I don't 
pretend to really understand how the various tables etc. work.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

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