[Development] Qt/XCB applications and deadkeys (which cease working)

[Thiago Macieira]

On Saturday, 3 June 2017 01:11:01 PDT René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> I use the "English (Macintosh)" keyboard variant with the standard "English
> (US)" layout. Like on Mac, this gives me accented characters via deadkeys
> that associate the most common occurrences: AltGr+e is the deadkey for
> e-acute, AltGr+i the deadkey for i-circonflex etc.
> 
> At random intervals I lose the deadkey aspect in the sense that in Qt4
> applications, AltGr+e will insert the acute on itself (idem for the other
> combinations) and Qt5 applications the deadkey does nothing at all. IOW, in
> Qt4 apps I get the accent followed by the to-be-accented letter (´e) while
> in Qt5 I just get the letter without the accent.

Just to provide a different viewpoint: I've only ever used "English (Alt 
International)" for the last, oh, 20 years, and I haven't had deadkey problems 
in the last 3. There was some problem in some early versions of Qt 5 because 
of the XCB rewrite, along with problems with the compose map, but they haven't 
shown up in years.

I have never had problems with Qt 4.

What you're describing isn't exactly a Qt problem, but must be caused by some 
other application. The deadkeys lose their state if certain (keyboard) events 
get sent to the application between the deadkey and the modified key. If some 
other application is playing tricks with your keyboard, it will affect the 
deadkeys.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center