International keyboard layouts do not work correctly

[frontsideair]

I tried the examples on demo page using standard Turkish (Q) layout, but some of them didn't work. (Namely, '$' and '*'.)

Now I tried them again and somehow made them work. $ character is typed using AltGr+4 combination, but it didn't work with it or the US variant Shift+4; however it works for AltGr+Shift+4.

On the other hand, asterisk character has a seperate key for itself on Turkish layout. But it also doesn't work. It works by combining Turkish and US layouts and pressing AltGr+Shift+8 --and followed by 'a', of course, for the example to work.

[ccampbell]

Thanks for this. I definitely did not test this with non US keyboard layouts. I'll have to take a look later.

[robnyman]

I can only concur that it's the same issue on a Swedish keyboard.

[ccampbell]

So I think I have an idea about what might fix this. Right now I'm converting to keyCode at binding time, but I think if I store the actual character and then on keypress I use String.fromCharCode(e.keyCode) to compare it might fix this. Will try to experiment with it later.

[jamesarosen]

The "shift-map" concept doesn't work in an international context. ? is Shift-+ on Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish keyboards.

But wait, there's more! If you buy Keybaords From Around the World™ (not actually ™) now, we'll throw in all of the following mappings of ? for free!

• Shift-' for Italian, Spanish, Latin American, Portuguese (but not Brazilian), Czech, Bosnian, Croatian, Switzerland, and many others
• France and Belgium have the lovely Shift-, for ?
• For your Turkish friends, we've got Shift-*
• No Shift needed in Austria and Germany. There, ? is its own key!

"You're forgetting Poland!" I hear you shout. Nope, we haven't forgotten Poland, where ? is Shift-4. (For those interested, Shift-/ is actually §, except on all the Polish keyboards with no / key, where you type Shift-9 for /.)

And many, many more...

[FredrikWendt]

I would guess that @jamesarosen is all right (unless you can tell the keyboard layout from JavaScript and the browser, on all OS:es you want to support (apart from the browsers) - as far as I know, I've not seen that in any spec or reference. What I think you can do is make a fairly educated guess on keyboard layout based on locale + OS (for Mac keyboards).
From the docs: "Saying ? is the same thing as saying shift+/" - this part, I think you should separate from the core, or at least allow for pluggability so it can be modified to suite the intended.

Good summaries: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/673905/best-way-to-determine-users-locale-within-browser and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1043339/javascript-for-detecting-browser-language-preference

[ccampbell]

Does anyone know if jquery.hotkeys works correctly with international keyboards? I noticed that the way the keys are matched uses String.fromCharCode(keyCode) vs. directly mapping.

I am playing around with it now in a local branch. I hope to have a fix/solution soon.

[FredrikWendt]

If you want a Swedish keyboard I could send you one. Its layout is very similar to Norwegian, Danish and Finnish, yet rather different from US apart from a-z and space. :-)

[jamesarosen]

If you're willing to use keypress instead of keyup, you can get a reliable character code of 67 for ?, across all keyboards. Those character codes aren't compatible with String.fromCharCode, though.

[jamesarosen]

By the way, this problem isn't unique to this project. I've raised the issue on Keymaster and KeyboardJS.

jquery.hotkeys has the same problem, too.

[ccampbell]

Hey. Just wanted to comment here to give you all an update. I just pushed out version 1.1, and I think for the most part this ticket should be resolved.

I added support for keypress events which get the character code instead of the keyCode. I tested by changing my mac to a non US keyboard layout and it seems to work in all the tests I conducted. You guys can let me know though.

Basically it is recommended to not specify an event type. For example if you do

Mousetrap.bind('?', _shortcuts);

Then it will use a keypress event.

If you do

Mousetrap.bind('enter', function() {});

Then it will use a keydown event.

[frontsideair]

Works perfectly on Turkish layout. Thanks!

[skfd]

Henlo, I think that does not work anymore. Tested on main site by doing Mousetrap.bind('a', ()=>console.log('x'), 'keypress') in console and pressing A button in russian layout.

So, on event contains charCode, keyCode and which all returning 1092 instead of 97 for letter A. There's code: "KeyA" which does proper detection, but it's not supported by Android Chrome...