Spanish Keyboard: BracketLeft is not populated in keymap

[bryphe]

Hi there,

First off, thank you for this library! It was tremendously helpful in adding intl keyboard support for my project.

It's worked great in general, but I'm seeing a strange issue on Windows 10 with the Spanish keyboard (es-ES).

When I call getCurrentKeymap, it seems to be missing the BracketLeft key in this case:

This reproduces in both Electron (v1.7.7) and Node (v.7.2.1).

A minimal repro is as follows:

• Create a new folder
• Run npm install keyboard-layout
• Run node for the node CLI
• Run require("keyboard-layout").getCurrentKeymap()["BracketLeft"]

Expected: Should see an entry for this key binding.
Actual: No entry is shown, but BracketRight has a key map entry:

Thanks for your help.

[Ben3eeE]

Hey,

Thank you for the report! This is happening because BracketLeft is on a dead key. We had to stop translating dead keys on Windows because translating them to the keymap changed the in-progress dead key state in the kernel-mode keyboard buffer. This caused problems in Atom with being able to type dead keys in certain circumstances. Relevant PR here: #19 and #29.

Resolving [ on a Spanish layout still works in Atom because we are resolving keystrokes using KeyboardEvent.key from chromium and only fallback to the keymap from keyboard-layout in special cases. This translation is done in atom-keymap https://github.com/atom/atom-keymap/blob/fe3438a8ae4034ee56e30c3ea07920e75b4211cc/src/helpers.coffee#L137

We do want to support dead keys in keyboard-layout some day because having them in the keymap would enable us to bind commands to dead keys on Windows in the same way as we do on macOS. Currently it is not possible at all to bind commands to dead keys on Windows in Atom.

[bryphe]

Thanks @Ben3eeE for the detailed response! Very helpful and it makes sense - having the dead key state change underneath you would be a deal breaker...

We do want to support dead keys in keyboard-layout some day because having them in the keymap would enable us to bind commands to dead keys on Windows in the same way as we do on macOS. Currently it is not possible at all to bind commands to dead keys on Windows in Atom.

Excellent! It's great to know you plan on supporting this eventually. In the meantime, I'll have a similar restriction in my project.