Second keyboard layout makes binds behave differently

[fyrk]

Say I have these keybinds configured:

Mod+odiaeresis { spawn "org.mozilla.firefox"; }
Mod+R { spawn "swaylock"; }

(odiaeresis is "Ö", as reported by wez)

I use the Noted layout, and have configured it using layout "noted", which makes the keybinds work as expected.

If, however, I add a second layout (layout "noted,de"), the first keybind stops working (just types an "ö"), while the second one works as before. Interestingly, changing the first keybind to Mod+B { spawn "org.mozilla.firefox"; } will make it work with two layouts (Noted's "Ö" is B on a QWERTZ/Y layout)

System Information

• niri version: niri unstable 2024-03-22 (commit 0d2fdb4)

[YaLTeR]

@kchibisov any idea what's going on here? Maybe something to do with "raw latin or keysym" resolution?

[kchibisov]

The latin key is traversed in all layouts, de likely has a latin key here, so it's not getting checked in other layout? One solution would be to check all latin layouts, but it could be really confusing, since you know that you have a key in a completely different place on this particular layout.

So I'd say that the current behavior is expected because DE layout is latin capable, and it doesn't have such binding at all. Maybe it should resolve other layouts, but it's really tricky.

I'd probably suggest to change the way how the bindings resolution is done, by having a bindings layout or something, probably much simpler and reliably than a bunch of heuristics, though, it could be not that consistent in regular apps...

[YaLTeR]

@fyrk I wonder, do you see the same issue in apps? With a bind like Ctrl+odiaeresis.

[fyrk]

Okay, so, I made a few tests.

• setting layout "noted,ru" makes Mod+ö open Firefox, as expected, so apparently the issue does not appear with all second keyboard layouts
• adding map ctrl+ö new_window to kitty's config and pressing Ctrl+ö works regardless of second keyboard layout.
  This is printed by kitty --debug-keyboard with any of the three layout configurations (yes, alternate_key is always 98 (b)):

  Press xkb_keycode: 0x30 clean_sym: odiaeresis composed_sym: odiaeresis mods: ctrl glfw_key: 246 (ö) xkb_key: 246 (odiaeresis) alternate_key: 98 (b)
  

I also noticed that typing Mod+odiaresis using "noted,de" types an "ö" in some apps, but not in others. Not sure if this is related. Here's a small table:

layout →	"noted", "noted,ru"	"noted,de"	"noted", "noted,ru"	"noted,de"
niri.kdl shortcut →	Mod+odiaresis	Mod+odiaresis	Mod+R	Mod+R
App ↓
Firefox (Flatpak)	opens FF	nothing	locks	locks
codium (nixpkgs)	opens FF	types "ö"	locks	locks
kitty (nixpkgs)	opens FF	types "^[[246;9u"	locks	locks

Is there anything else I can test?

[YaLTeR]

Thanks for the testing.

setting layout "noted,ru" makes Mod+ö open Firefox, as expected, so apparently the issue does not appear with all second keyboard layouts

Yes, that is expected. The problem here is that the ö key produces a latin character on the de layout, so when the de layout is present, this latin character preferred for the binding resolution. The ru layout does not have any latin characters so it doesn't change the binding resolution. You could try with us for example which should also have a latin character there, and it should show a similar issue.

Is there anything else I can test?

Yeah, would you be able to try what a Ctrl+ö (or Alt+ö or Shift+ö, anything) bind does in other toolkits too, not just kitty? E.g. Firefox (GTK 3), something GTK 4, VSCode. Specifically, do they reproduce the same issue where with just noted it works, but with noted,de it doesn't work (and instead only Ctrl+B will work).