Keyboard shortcuts do not fully support a range of locales

[simongray]

Currently, the keyboard shortcuts are biased towards English keyboard layouts (en_US, en_UK, etc.) and unfortunately cannot be customised by users in any way. This means that any keyboard shortcuts that feature a key that is non-standard in a certain locale is inaccessible to all of those users.

Shortcuts such as M-/ for line comment/uncomment are thus inaccessible to users whose keyboards do not have "/" as a stand-alone key on the keyboard. This is the case in for example German, Swedish, and Danish where "/" is an alternative symbol that is accessed by also holding down shift. The same holds true for shortcuts such as M-{ and M-< which are also inaccessible on e.g. Danish keyboards.

[samaaron]

Yes, this is unfortunately a known problem. We’d love some help making things more configurable for non-us/uk keyboards :)

[simongray]

@samaaron I would love to help, but I'm not familiar with the source code currently (only just started dabbling with Sonic Pi). Is there a single config file that controls the mapping of the keyboard shortcuts? Then at least the more technically inclined might edit the source directly as a temporary solution.

[simongray]

@samaaron the keybindings are all hardcoded in the section of this one C++ file, right?

So I guess the immediate solution is to move the definitions to an external config file. I need to build it on a Mac and the only build instruction I could so far find is this. Is there anything else to know?

[samaaron]

@simongray - yep, you're right it is currently all hardcoded and it would be lovely to start extracting it out to a more configurable code base.

Unfortunately building Sonic Pi is non-trivial, but do have a go and let us know if you're running into issues.

[samaaron]

Closing as this is a duplicate of #1693 - please head over there to continue the conversation :-)