Very strange keyboard behavior...

eje211 · 2025-09-22 05:38:29

I'm new to Arch and I love it! It's incredible that you can install a package from a git repo!

I have a new, fresh install. I've already customized quite a bit. Among other things, I'm using the Z Shell (trying to finally move beyond bash), and I'm using a weird keyboard: the French keyboard, dvorak variant. I've used it forever. It never was a problem before.

But the keyboard is behaving strangely and I don't know where to start looking for what is wrong. I tried asking Google and it says that my console program must have special settings. It does not.

I made a video to show what the problem is.

While writing this message, the issue was still occurring. I can't use any of the four arrow keys, but ctrl+arrow left and ctrl+arrow right let me skip from word to word. The return key produces a different character that changes when I use the arrow keys. The sequence of characters in produces seems to be: v, g, y, and space.

I guess I could create a new user profile and start over, but I'd rather at least try to figure out where the problem comes from.

Thanks to anyone who can help!

seth · 2025-09-22 09:09:06

This is *only* about the arrows and your terminal?
What terminal emulator is involved here (xterm, linux console, alacritty, …)?
What do the arrow keys print when you run "cat"? (up, right, bottom, left - like a clock)

eje211 · 2025-09-23 01:44:39

Thanks for replying! I keep forgetting about this, until I try to type anything. And I am brutally reminded.

The terminal I use most often is Yakuake, based on Konsole. The issue also appeared on Konsole. Let me try xterm.

It seems like something I should have thought of myself in retrospect, but xterm works completely as expected. I'm guessing that xterm uses neither Qt nor Gtk, right? Could the problem be with Qt? If so, why would it also be present in Firefox. And how would I diagnose that?

The problem does not seem to occur in the Linux console, the one you get without a desktop environment launched or by using the ctrl+alt+F-key combo. (By the way, the screen on which Wayland shows up seems to vary. Currently, it's screen 2. Sometimes it's screen 6. Screen 1 only shows a blinking cursor. The Arch docs said Wayland should show up on screen 1. This is not a problem, I'm just mentioning it in case it's a useful detail.) More testing has reminded me that, in the Linux terminal, another keyboard layout is in use: dvorak-fr. That layout is similar but not identical to french variant dvorak. Among other differences, dvorak-fr does not use dead keys.

That why I noticed that dead keys don't work well in Wayland, neither in Yakuake or in the Firefox, which I am currently typing in. My keyboard layout makes heavy use of them. Switching to the en_US keyboard layout does not change the issue with the arrow keys or with the return key. The dead keys work as expected in xterm. That really puzzles me. Not just that, but xterm is also using the correct layout: french variant dvorak.

What I get with cat (down, enter, left, enter, up, enter, right, enter) changes often. Currently, it's: d s w e. On other recent attempts, the printount has included w, q, nothing (or maybe a dead key), W (that's capital w), and, I think, "home".

If I change the layout to the US keyboard, I get (going round a few times): y, t, space, dot, u, y, space, dot, u, y, space. (I just typed return out of reflex, and it printed m instead.)

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to figure out what the problem is. My guess is that there may be an issue with the character set or the keyboard model, even though as far as I know, they are both set correctly: utf-8 and standard 105-key keyboard. But maybe they're not set correctly everywhere.

seth · 2025-09-23 06:59:40

Yakuake, based on Konsole … xterm works completely as expected

=> https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/qterminal/ ?

Do you use any https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Input_method (fcitx5)?
Does konsole in an X11 session behave correctly?
Also (especially iff the latter) what wayland compositor do you use? kwin_wayland ie. plasma on wayland?

eje211 · 2025-09-23 08:08:24

I'm going to look into those tomorrow. But I can already say this:

I have never had a need to enter any CJK character on this specific installation yet. Usually, when I do need some Chinese or Japanese character from a device other than my phone, but I do it the stupid way: I go look for the word on Wiktionary and copy and paste it. Or I use a website like this one. So I'm pretty sure that the answer to the first question is no.

I absolutely use kwin_wayland. When I'm on another OS, I miss the wobbly windows of the Plasma shell. And I installed Wayland because, apparently, it is now the right thing to do. Actually, kwin_x11 is not even installed on the machine (yet). I'll install it tomorrow (it's late here) and try it. Hopefully, that will provide some answers. I will also try q-terminal.

Personally, I don't feel hugely committed to Wayland. X forwarding is the kind of thing that felt very Unix-y to me. True, it was not useful that often, but it was always nice to know I could use it if I needed it. I understand that X no longer makes sense in a world where 3D acceleration and hardware codecs are everywhere, but I never had a problem with it. I read everywhere that Wayland was the way to go, so I followed the instructions and picked it over X.

eje211 · 2025-09-24 01:50:23

I know this must be pretty logical, but it surprises me nevertheless. On X11, so far, everything seems to work perfectly. It now seems pretty obvious that the problem is with Wayland. I'll look more into it in that direction. (I would never have guessed Wayland. Plasma maybe, but not Wayland. And certainly would not have tried to test X11 without those instructions.)

seth · 2025-09-24 11:52:10

Plasma /is/ wayland in this case and the input depends on the compositor, and IME and the client.
Do you also use the french dvorak layout on X11?
Do you have the same problem on wayland w/ the azerty layout?

Did you btw test qterminal?
You could also check the behavior of alacritty or some VTE based terminal (ie. native wayland client but not Qt)

eje211 · 2025-09-25 22:39:19

Sorry about the late posting. I hadn't seen a notification about your reply.

I use the French Dvorak layout everywhere I can. I can't touch type with either QWERTY or AZERTY. That's why I decided to learn another keyboard layout.

I'm typing this from X11 now. Before the change, I tried to use the apps with an QWERTY keyboard layout (en_US) and the problems were still there: I couldn't use the arrow keys pretty much anywhere and the return key typed unpredicable characters. I'll check again after I've logged out, just to be absolutely sure, but I remember having tried it. I haven't tried AZERTY, but I'm not sure that would be useful.

I'm going to log out, log in back in Wayland mode, and try Qterminal and Alacrity now.

eje211 · 2025-09-25 22:49:47

I just briefly logged in with Wayland. I can confirm, the problem is exactly the same with Qterminal and Alacrity. It is also present with the en_US layout.

One thing that may be useful (I don't know) is that if I remove focus from an application and the give it focus back again, the problem is reset. Basically, the arrow keys still don't work, but enter works until I start to use the arrow keys.

It really looks like the problem is in Wayland. Maybe there are logs I can check to try and figure out where exactly it happens. I don't know if I'd be able to contribute a fix, but if I can, I'll try.

seth · 2025-09-26 13:22:23

Do you get this w/ weston, sway, hyprland, labwc etc or is this KDE specific?
Do the arrow keys actually work in non-terminals, eg. kwrite?
Do you have another keyboard?
What does

sudo evtest

report for the arrow keys (the context - wayland, X11 etc. - doesn't matter)

eje211 · 2025-10-08 20:39:08

Sorry about the late reply. I've been enjoying my OS in X11 mode. But I know I can't rely on it forever.

The keys problem is present in Kate, KWrite, and this text box in which I'm tying now (in Firefox). It's infuriating.

I didn't know Weston existed and I just tried it. To my absolute astonishment, everything works in Weston. A Kate session opened in Weston lets me use the arrow keys the way I expect them to work inside the Weston window. But a tiny bit of research has shown that I cannot use Weston as Plasma's compositor. Annoying.

Also, is there a way for me to figure out where the problem comes from so that it can be reproduced and addressed?

Last edited by eje211 (2025-10-08 20:41:51)

seth · 2025-10-08 21:27:31

my absolute astonishment … Annoying

You're starting to understand the fundamental problem w/ wayland

seth wrote:

Do you have another keyboard?

seth wrote:

What does
sudo evtest
report for the arrow keys (the context - wayland, X11 etc. - doesn't matter)

eje211 · 2025-10-09 01:33:09

I personally don't like having to scroll through long terminal outputs pasted into forums, so I made a pastebin. (Let me know if it was the wrong thing to do.) Should I try this again on X11?

I'm also having trouble getting the layout that I want on SDDM. I thought that these two issues were unrelated so I didn't bring it up. If it unrelated, ignore this. But maybe Wayland is looking for the wrong keyboard layouts somehow. I know it uses the X11 layouts anyway, as opposed to using its own formats. (Unless I understood wrong.) The layout in the text mode consoles (I'm not sure it's the right name, the ones you get with crtl-alt-F key) uses a layout that, so far, I've only seen on Arch. That layout is not available on KDE. It's similar to my regular French Dvorak layout, but with big differences. For example, the regular French Dvorak layout uses dead keys for many characters. Instead, this console-mode layout uses the AltGr key Again, this may be completely unrelated, I'm just pointing it out in case it means something.

seth wrote:

You're starting to understand the fundamental problem w/ wayland

I really don't understand much about Wayland. I'm not much of a graphics guy. What I do know is that X11 worked on the basis of a server-client architecture. That's why X-forwarding worked easily out of the box. However, that architecture was complicated and made less and less sense in a world of 3D acceleration. On the other hand, Wayland is basically a gateway to the graphics device. It has much fewer built-in abilities (none of which are really that useful anymore anyway), but give much easier access to the advanced features of graphics devices. I know this in concept. I have no practical experience dealing with things on that level. The main reason I use Wayland is because most instructions seem to say that, nowadays, it's the right thing to do, and I tend to try to do the right thing.

Lone_Wolf · 2025-10-09 08:35:11

eje211 wrote:

so I made a pastebin.

pastebin.com is not popular here, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … n_services for alternatives.

eje211 wrote:

it's the right thing to do, and I tend to try to do the right thing.

It's very questionable whether wayland is the best way forward, don't let others decide for you

seth · 2025-10-09 08:36:00

pastebins specifically is discouraged from because it's blocked in some parts of the world but generally is fine and so is the keyboard input - there're no weird (stray) events or anything like that.
As mentioned, the context doesn't matter (evdev is the lowest layer)
Still

seth wrote:

Do you have another keyboard?

I'm also having trouble getting the layout that I want on SDDM.

SDDM defaults to X11, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg/K … tion_files does not work?

The layout in the text mode consoles … uses a layout that, so far, I've only seen on Arch.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_ … n#Loadkeys - are you trying to use dual-layout here as well?

Back on topic:

I guess I could create a new user profile and start over

Have you tried that and is the new user affected as well?

There's an X11 feature called pointerkeys where you can navigate the mouse with the numpad (incl. the arrows there) - since the problem only affects kwin_wayland and the arrow keys this might be some half-baked approach to re-implement sth. like this.
Did you play around w/ any accessibility settings?

----
About the wayland situation:
The problem is that the display server X11 covered much more than just graphics, the wayland protocol only covers how clients and the server share a window texture (and has nothing to do w/ HW access at all) and some basic input handling (in currently three incompatible protocol versions) and none of the rest.
So you've plenty of somewhat incompatible wayland implementations, intermingled with window management and gridlocked with at least parts of the shell which rely on proprietary features of that implementation.
To fill in the glaring gaps (like screenshots? It btw took over a decade to get copy-and-paste into a mostly functional condition) the current approach is to use xdg-portals which was meant to allow desktop integration of flatpak's and itself relies on various, somewhat incompatible, daemon implementations.
Various adjacent tools (like xrandr, xdotool, wmctrl, fcitx) would have to chase that, in doubt with different backend implementations.

It's currently a Kafkaesque fragmentation of an already niche desktop and there's too much vanity involved to change anything about that in the forseeable future - the moment you step out of the core of your chosen wayland desktop environment, you enter a mine field…

Arch Linux

#1 2025-09-22 05:38:29

Very strange keyboard behavior...

#2 2025-09-22 09:09:06

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#3 2025-09-23 01:44:39

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#4 2025-09-23 06:59:40

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#5 2025-09-23 08:08:24

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#6 2025-09-24 01:50:23

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#7 2025-09-24 11:52:10

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#8 2025-09-25 22:39:19

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#9 2025-09-25 22:49:47

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#10 2025-09-26 13:22:23

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#11 2025-10-08 20:39:08

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#12 2025-10-08 21:27:31

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#13 2025-10-09 01:33:09

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#14 2025-10-09 08:35:11

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

#15 2025-10-09 08:36:00

Re: Very strange keyboard behavior...

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