GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 126739
GKB hotkey switching doesn't work under FC1
Last modified: 2009-08-15 18:40:50 UTC
I'm using Gnome 2.4 under Fedora Core 1 (Metacity as WM); after upgrading to this release from REL9/Gnome2.2 I can't get hot-key switching of keyboard layouts to work anymore. I use the US-english and Swedish keyboard layouts, and I usually have Alt-(left-shift) set up as the keyboard switching hotkey (same as the default in MS Windows) but no matter what I change it to I can't get the applet to respond. Clicking on the applet to change keyboards works fine, so I assume that the keystroke just never gets throught to the applet. (The applet does perfectly well at grabbing whatever keystroke I want when I'm setting this up in the config dialog.) I normally use sloppy focus in Metacity, but changing to click-to-focus doesn't change anything, even when clicking on the background to defocus all windows, or clicking on the panel. (Perhaps stupid, but I thought that maybe it could be a focus problem...)
Oops, I was a bit wrong - it doesn't work when I only use modifier keys, it does work if there are other keys involved. Apparently this was reported earlier in Red Hat's bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=104441
Rob, is this another instance of bug 115072?
*** Bug 127037 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
sorry to take so long to reply; filtering gone terribly wrong :-). Do you mean that you try to focus the keyboard switcher applet and then use a shortcut key to change the layout, or do you mean that you've configured a metacity shortcut key to change the layout for you? There is a bug somewhere about metacity not updating its keyboard shortcuts when the layout switches. Is that what you mean, perhaps? You switch the layout but the metacity shortcuts stay the same?
Hmm. I really didn't think that I would have to focus the applet before using the hotkeys, it used to work (in Gnome 2.2 / Red Hat Linux 9) just to use them at any time... Besides, how would I focus the applet without clicking on it? (Using click-to-focus. Sloppy focus doesn't work any better, though.) Using the hotkeys simply doesn't change the keyboard layout. Clicking does... The problem is that if I configure switcher hotkeys that only contain modifier keys (such as e.g. the default Alt-Shift_L which I would like to use) they just don't work. If the key combination (set up in the applet setup dialog) contains some other key, such as a letter (e.g. Alt-Shift_L-Z ) it Just Works. However, three-key combos are annoying and I hate having to figure out what's unused by everything that I want to use. Alt-Shift_L is teh Windows default for keyboard switching, it's nice to be able to use the same since I haven't thought of any sane reason to use anything else. A quick note though: Alexandre Oliva, who reported the bug inthe Red Hat bugzilla (as I discovered after filing this one) seemed to think that it could be related to some Red Hat patches for X. Mike Harris essentially shot that idea down, but I haven't been able to test with an older X server like he suggested though, I'm afraid.
oh, I see; you want to have a keyboard shortcut that uses _just_ modifier keys. When you said alt-left-shift I though you were talking about the left arrow key. I don't think that modifier-only bindings could really be expected to work. Aside from the fact that it's an ill-advised thing to do, the behavior is somewhat ill-defined. But it definitely sounds like it's not a metacity issue.
Updating status whiteboard to reflect a11y team's assessment of priority.
There is a patch for this in bug #101960, can someone please test it and apply main-stream? Thanks.
That patch has been applied. Does it fix this bug?
I think that this is probably moot now, the switching works fine with the applet in Gnome 2.6 (gswitchit + the keyboard prefs dialog for setting up the bindings). I'll close the bug, although I don't know if it's fixed in later 2.4 releases.