[SOLVED] German Umlaute under KDE - only ä is not working

hampelratte · 2017-08-26 11:33:53

I'm having trouble with the keyboard layout under KDE/Plasma 5. I can't type the 'ä' even though 'ü' and 'ö' are working fine. I think I narrowed it down to KDE, because on a tty I can type an 'ä' and if I open xev, it also prints out 'ä' on the console. So my system in general and the xserver should be fine. In the KDE settings for input devices I tried different keyboard types (generic 101/104/105 etc.) and I also setup the layout to be german. I have no idea what else I should try.

It's a laptop (Asus Zenbook ux31e), so maybe that plays a role.

Any ideas on this?

Last edited by hampelratte (2017-08-26 19:08:00)

seth · 2017-08-26 14:28:29

What do you instead get when hitting the "ä"? No input at all or just some other glyph?
Does this affect all applications? (Try xterm, and I mean: "xterm", NOT konsole)
What happens if you kill kglobalaccel?

ezequiel.ezb · 2017-08-26 14:35:50

I had a similar problem that was happening to me prior to the latest update of plasma-wayland-session, which is now on version 5.10.5-2 and previously was 5.10.5-1, but only on a wayland session, and in my case not only umlauts but any accented letter would not work, the behaviour would be only the letter appearing despite me pressing the accent prior to the letter. I also remember Kwin being updated to 5.10.5-1 (and it remains in this version).

I don't know if the problem is the same for you, but maybe you should try pacman -Syu if you haven't yet, even though in my case I now have a different bug regarding the umlauts (when I press them the Alt+F2 menu pops up instead). But if your problem is the same of mine even in a X session, I think the problem might be a bug in Kwin.

hampelratte · 2017-08-26 14:36:05

It's the same behaviour in xterm. It seems, that it's interpreting it as some kind of control sequence, because the cursor flashes on a key press.

Killing kglobalaccel helped! Afterwards the 'ä' worked as intended. Now my question is, what do I have to change to get kglobalaccel on "german track" ?

seth · 2017-08-26 15:04:31

There's some global shortcut assigned to the key - but don't ask me which or why.
iirc "kcmshell5 kglobalaccel" should allow you to configure the global shortcuts

Another possible cause is that the wrong code is grabbed before the german keymap is applied.
In that case configuring the keyboard layout "early" (ie. with an Xorg configlet) might turn out being more robust.

hampelratte · 2017-08-26 15:33:04

It has definitely something to do with kglobalaccel. First I went through all hot keys, to see, if 'ä' is already assigned to something, but it isn't. Then I played around a bit and discovered this:
If I open the global hot key configuration (btw. it's "kcmshell5 keys") and click on any button to assign a new hot key, then hit 'ä', it is actually recognized as 'ä'. When I hit apply and try to type 'ä' in any application, it still doesn't work. Now, when I reset the previously configured hot key (free up 'ä') and apply that, suddenly it works everywhere.

Last edited by hampelratte (2017-08-26 16:42:37)

seth · 2017-08-26 17:55:20

Try to simply restart kglobalaccel5 after the login (kill and start the process) - if tha works, the wrong code is grabbed because plasma starts with a US layout and then switches to the DE one.

hampelratte · 2017-08-26 19:07:23

seth wrote:

... because plasma starts with a US layout and then switches to the DE one.

This rang a bell. I remembered, that I had to add the keyboard layout in sddm's Xsetup a while ago. Otherwise sddm always used an English layout. I removed this line and now everything works.

sddm now uses the correct layout even without the line in Xsetup, even though it shows an American flag on top (I guess, that's a visual bug).

Problem solved, thank you very much.

Arch Linux

#1 2017-08-26 11:33:53

[SOLVED] German Umlaute under KDE - only ä is not working

#2 2017-08-26 14:28:29

Re: [SOLVED] German Umlaute under KDE - only ä is not working

#3 2017-08-26 14:35:50

Re: [SOLVED] German Umlaute under KDE - only ä is not working

#4 2017-08-26 14:36:05

Re: [SOLVED] German Umlaute under KDE - only ä is not working

#5 2017-08-26 15:04:31

Re: [SOLVED] German Umlaute under KDE - only ä is not working

#6 2017-08-26 15:33:04

Re: [SOLVED] German Umlaute under KDE - only ä is not working

#7 2017-08-26 17:55:20

Re: [SOLVED] German Umlaute under KDE - only ä is not working

#8 2017-08-26 19:07:23

Re: [SOLVED] German Umlaute under KDE - only ä is not working

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