Arch Linux

sunjerry019

Member

Registered: 2020-04-14

Posts: 5

Keyboard shortcuts not working on German Keyboard

I have just encountered a very peculiar problem. I am currently using Gnome with ibus, and have my German keyboard set as a secondary input keyboard layout through the Region and Languages setting in Gnome in this order:

1. English (US)

2. German

Whenever I switch to my German keyboard, application keyboard shortcuts do not work.

For example, in Gnome-Terminal, Ctrl + C is supposed to terminate a running process, but does not do so if I am using my German keyboard.
evtest however shows that my keyboard events are being captured as per normal:

Event: time 1586827448.903447, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value 700e0
Event: time 1586827448.903447, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 29 (KEY_LEFTCTRL), value 1
Event: time 1586827448.903447, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1586827449.005454, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value 70006
Event: time 1586827449.005454, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 46 (KEY_C), value 1
Event: time 1586827449.005454, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1586827449.129837, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value 70006
Event: time 1586827449.129837, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 46 (KEY_C), value 0
Event: time 1586827449.129837, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1586827449.247665, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value 700e0
Event: time 1586827449.247665, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 29 (KEY_LEFTCTRL), value 0
Event: time 1586827449.247665, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------

This happens in applications such as Firefox as well (e.g. Ctrl + T does not open a new tab). However, global shortcuts seem to work fine (e.g. I have set Ctrl + Alt + T to open Terminal and it does that). This happens in all applications that I have tested.

It is interesting to note that:
1. If I switch to using German as my default (first position) keyboard layout, the reverse happens and keyboard shortcuts don't work when I use the US keyboard
2. If I add an Italian keyboard (not as default), the shortcuts work on the Italian Keyboard
3. If I use the Italian keyboard as the default, shortcuts don't work in both English (US) and German layouts

System Information:

OS: Arch Linux 
Kernel: x86_64 Linux 5.5.13-arch2-1
Gnome: 3.36.1
IBus: 1.5.22

GTK_IM_MODULE="ibus"
XMODIFIERS="@im=ibus"

localectl status yields:

   System Locale: LANG=en_SG.UTF-8
       VC Keymap: us
      X11 Layout: us,de
     X11 Variant: ,nodeadkeys

This happened a while back rather suddenly and I couldn't really pinpoint what was changed in my system to have caused this issue, and I didn't manage to find anything on Google. I asked a few of my friends that use Linux and only one friend using Ubuntu Gnome has managed to reproduce this issue on their end.

Does anyone have a similar experience, or know how I can try to pinpoint the issue?

sunjerry019

Member

Registered: 2020-04-14

Posts: 5

Re: Keyboard shortcuts not working on German Keyboard

I think this is related to this issue:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=253816

linked to this upstream bug:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1144