Cannot get Colemak to work on MacOS

[te-lang-wakker]

Hello everyone 👋

I just installed Neru using Homebrew, but the layout seems stuck on QWERTY, despite my best efforts. Colemak is selected in MacOS (26.1, 25B78) as my current and default keyboard layout, and I also tried forcing it in the config, but to no avail:

> defaults read com.apple.HIToolbox AppleEnabledInputSources

…
     {
        InputSourceKind = "Keyboard Layout";
        "KeyboardLayout ID" = 12825;
        "KeyboardLayout Name" = Colemak;
    },
…

> cat ~/.config/neru/config.toml

…
kb_layout_to_use = "12825"                   # Force a keyboard layout InputSourceID (empty = auto)
…

I know for sure that Neru is reading this config, as messing up the syntax causes an error. This issue causes me the following immediate problems:

1. The labels for the recursive grid do not match my keyboard (though, physically, it makes no difference).
2. "Hints" mode (where each clickable element is assigned a label) requires me to type in QWERTY.

Maybe this has been discussed before, but I couldn't find any topics. Any ideas how to fix this?

[te-lang-wakker]

Okay, I found a solution. The correct configuration is as follows:

[general]
kb_layout_to_use = "com.apple.keylayout.Colemak" 

... which is not actually returned by the AppleEnabledInputSources command suggested in the docs. This fixes the actual inputs, so next you just need to configure the homerow to match Colemak:

[hints]
hint_characters = "arsthdeion"

[recursive_grid]
keys = "pgjtdhvbk" 

It would be nice if common keyboard layouts like Colemak worked fully out of the box, but the required configuration is actually pretty minimal if you know where to look.

[y3owk1n]

Merged to main 🥳 and it's available on nightly now, feel free to test it out if you can. Things to do:

• remove kb_layout_to_use completely from your config

and that should be it, try switching between us and colemak, it should be grabbing the right input source automatically.

[te-lang-wakker]

Thanks for the quick fix! I was just about to merge it locally, so I verified it working as follows:

1. Quit Neru
2. Moved/deleted my config file
3. Built (stale) main from source
   Result: Bug; input for both dynamic grid and hints is based on physical key location, rather than input method.
4. Merged this commit (or rather, just pulled from main, as you happened to beat me to the punch)
5. Rebuilt
   Result: No bug; input is based on my input method - any alternative layout user would know to rebind the hotkeys from this point.

I verified this both without a config and with the autogenerated config. The only issue I ran into is some really persistent restarting of my non-dev Neru after I pkilled it, but that's the service - not quite sure about the purpose of this feature other than silent recovery from crashes, but that's besides the point. The fix works perfectly 🙇‍♂️.

[y3owk1n]

Amazing! Thanks for pointing out the bug tho, i am not sure why no one reports this at all, and it's been there for like months... haha

Me myself, i am using Dvorak too, but i dont use input source like that, i uses kanata to literally remap the whole keyboard to the Dvorak that i wanted, so under the hood, i am still using us layout, hence this bug never occur to me at all.

For the services part, it uses launchd under the hood, it literally just asking macOS to keep this running whenever it's not running. This is useful for something like auto run when you restart your machine or something like that. If you don't want it, you can just uninstall the service. I think it was not installed automatically but requires user to install the service manually.

I dont use the services directly, as i am using it via nix darwin and home manager, but on nix side, we are also using launchd which does the same thing.

[te-lang-wakker]

Me myself, i am using Dvorak too, but i dont use input source like that, i uses kanata to literally remap the whole keyboard to the Dvorak that i wanted, so under the hood, i am still using us layout, hence this bug never occur to me at all.

Makes sense, I wouldn't have noticed on my dedicated keyboard either, since it's hardware remapped. I just switch to the built-in Colemak software layout when unplugged, but either should work with this fix.

I think it was not installed automatically but requires user to install the service manually.

Haha, true. I installed the service just in case it was somehow required to get Colemak working. The autostart is nice, but I suppose I can just set up the service manually without the auto restart. It's not an issue really, just something I ran into while testing the commit.

[y3owk1n]

Glad that everything works out now. Hope you enjoy Neru like i do, i poured my heart in it. XD