OS X's Dvorak-Qwerty mode does not work. about atom-keymap HOT 32 CLOSED

It's an issue with Chromium, on which Atom is based. You can track it here. This is not to say that we can't find some workaround, but I just haven't been able to dedicate time to it yet. We need a way of detecting that Dvorak-Qwerty is enabled at the system level, then employ a hard-coded translation in the keymap if it is.

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Thanks Nathan – I'll keep an eye on the Chromium developments.

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I also have the same issue — I type in "Dvorak Qwerty" mode. It make Atom pretty unusable, as much as I like it.

@nathansobo It doesn't look like Chromium's issue you linked to is going to being resolved any time soon. Could we try a workaround? Maybe you don't need to detect the user's keyboard layout — just add a checkbox setting under Keybindings that translates all of the shortcuts where necessary. Dvorak Qwerty mode users can go to Keybindings and check the box. Not ideal, since Dvorak Qwerty users would have to find that setting, but it would make the app usable.

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I like this idea. Would you be interested in submitting a PR on the atom/atom-keymap repo with tests that adds it? I'm thinking it would be good to allow some kind of translation table to be assigned on the keymap. Maybe something like:

atom.keymap.translateKeystrokes
   `cmd ctrl alt`:
      `o`: `s`
      # ...

Then we could use that from Atom. Just throwing things off the top of my head. We can definitely discuss other approaches. If you don't have time, that's totally cool, but it will be a while before I can add this because I'm focused on performance. I will get to it eventually though.

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That's a nice approach. Plus, it might allow Atom to support Dvorak-Qwerty on operating systems that only have the Dvorak layout natively (Windows + Linux), or even let Colemak typists (if they exist?) make their own translation table.

UPDATE:

Found something interesting. This is (part of) the keydown event that gets fired when I press the physical Cmd+C keys (which ideally would execute a copy on both Dvorak-Qwerty and Qwerty).

// KeyboardEvent
{
  "keyCode": 67, // C
  "keyIdentifier": "U+004A", // 74 = J
  "metaKey": true,
  "type": "keydown",
  "which": 67
}

... which means that the keyCode and which properties are correctly converted to Qwerty, but the keyIdentifier is not. So this might be as simple as using the event.which instead.

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Got it: https://github.com/donmccurdy/atom-keymap/commit/7c13fd07f29e10f14648e532279fe855f034a08f

Will spend a day or two testing this before I try a pull request, but it looks like everything is good on both Qwerty and Dvorak-Qwerty layouts. ..What I don't know, of course, is whether this does anything strange to Linux or Windows.. Based on the comments under charCodeFromHexCharCode(hexCharCode), it sounds like that could be an issue.

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Thanks for the merge! : )

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Suppose I might as well reopen this; haven't had the chance to look into the more detached solution we discussed (#22) but would like to do that eventually.

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It's alive! It would be great to have a volunteer to investigate what can be done at the Chromium level.

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I'm guessing that any really nice fix is going to require a good implementation of the event.key spec from Chromium, the Dvorak-Qwerty issue seems very similar to the problem in foreign keyboard layouts, #37.

I took another look at this yesterday and put together a translation table. My approach is:

1. If the user is on OSX and has any of the target modifier keys pressed (ctrl/alt/cmd), use keyCode to predict what Dvorak charCode would be expected if the Chromium bug persists.
2. If keyCode / charCode seem to be in sync, as you'd expect on any keyboard layout that doesn't dynamically remap with modifier keys, then nothing happens.
3. If they are mismatched, and that mismatch looks like a Dvorak/Qwerty relationship, then keyCode is used to generate a new charCode, and the event propagation goes on.

See changes here.

I've tested Qwerty, plain Dvorak, and Dvorak-Qwerty, and the keybindings seem to be working consistently (and not affecting the first two). There is some risk that an international keyboard layout might have mismatched keyCode / charCode values as well, and if any of those differences happen to be the same as Dvorak-to-Qwerty, they'll get weird results from that key. No idea how to test that possibility. :|

Any translation table-based fix is probably going to look more or less like this, but I'm curious about your thoughts on where to put it. On one hand, it wouldn't seem to difficult to put something in the keymap API along the lines of a registerKeyEventTranslator() function. But I don't love the idea of asking users to hunt down a plugin to fix a bug, either. On the other hand, if this were a standalone "Dvorak-Qwerty" plugin then maybe a feature could be added to remap shortcuts from Dvorak to Dvorak-Qwerty for Windows/Linux users, since they don't have a native layout that does the same thing.

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@donmccurdy We would only want to employ this mapping if Dvorak-Qwerty were enabled, right? Maybe we could start by adding a flag to the KeymapManager that could be used to explicitly enable it, then enable it via a config option in Atom. A next step would be to use OS X APIs to detect the Dvorak-Qwerty mapping being enabled and automatically assign the flag. Thanks for staying on this. What are your thoughts?

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The mapping won't affect anything on a Qwerty keyboard (it only kicks in if the keyCode and keyIdentifier don't correspond), but all bets are off on international layouts. A config option might be a good way to go. If we could read from ~/Library/Preferences/ then we could detected the keyboard layout. Would Chromium support that?

A config option wouldn't have to be specific to Dvorak-Qwerty, if we made it a flag to look at keyCode instead of keyIdentifier when a modifier key is down. Kind of a long-shot but that might solve some things for international keyboards if they want shortcuts mapped to physical locations on the keyboard rather than character values.

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Here's a simpler fix, using a config option and without a Dvorak-Qwerty table:

https://github.com/donmccurdy/atom-keymap/commit/1cfd6109c3726360546687a0def117f08f7a1c34

This covers all case-insensitive shortcuts, but to have things like shift-$ work for the Vim plugin we would need to map the keyCode with WindowsAndLinuxCharCodeTranslations, even on OSX. A more specific name for the option might be "Bind events to physical key location".

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@donmccurdy Hello. Can you explain how to install your fix in my Atom (OSX, Mavericks)? Should I build project by grunt and them put builded files somewhere?

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You'll need to build Atom from source, and then link to my fork of the keymap repository. There are instructions here:

https://atom.io/docs/v0.127.0/advanced/node-modules

You'll need to clone [email protected]:donmccurdy/atom-keymap.git instead of the official keymap repo, and then check out the "patch.dvorak.v3" branch.

Once you've built Atom, the patch will add a checkbox in the settings for the Keymap module, and with that enabled your Dvorak shortcuts should work.

P.S. @nathansobo The linked instructions work for the initial build, but the way they describe updating the build after you modify the keymap isn't really working for me, I'm re-running "script/build" every time. Did something change?

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Thank you for fast respond.

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https://gist.github.com/cidevant/a7ab047c2c16174d1eb1

I can't find a Keymap module settings? Where is it? I see only: Settings, Keybindings, Packages, Themes in Settings viewer (CMD-,).

Update
I finally got it after reviewing your last commit! Keymap module settings phrase was not absolutely clear for me. For others: just navigate Atom -> Open your config and add this line to the end of file:

'atom-keymap':
  'bindEventsToKeycode': true

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Oh, nice! That actually isn't the way I'd meant, I was filtering packages by "keymap" and then clicking a checkbox there, but perhaps the keymap package wasn't showing up for some reason. Is the option working for you?

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No, I don`t see keymap package. When I filtering by "key" the only result I get is "Keybinding Resolver" package (I don't remember, if I manually installed it or it already was in default bundle of packages for Atom.io)

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I also am not seeing the the keymap package after following these instructions:
https://gist.github.com/cidevant/a7ab047c2c16174d1eb1

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If those instructions work then that's fine as a quick fix, but I suspect you'll need to rebuild Atom from source rather than just running commands inside the /Applications folder to get that option to show up. That would involve cloning the main https://github.com/atom/atom repository, doing the npm link step, and then running script/build. (At least until a fix is merged to master).

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There's a way to enable the dvorak support by hand? I'm using a custom Dvorak layout and doesn't works.

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You can try tossing this in your init script and see what happens.

atom.keymaps.dvorakQwertyWorkaroundEnabled = true

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@nathansobo I've tried, doesn't works

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Could anyone help me here?

@nathansobo There's a possibility to made a patch to allow enable the dvorak support by hand? I've been reading the code, so I tried to create a custom keyboard layout with the same layout ID that Atom verifies, but without success.

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Thanks so much for implementing this. Dropping the following to the init script now works:
atom.keymaps.dvorakQwertyWorkaroundEnabled = true
Also applicable to dvorak based custom layouts such as Programming Dvorak

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Thanks so much for this. Just made my life with atom on a Dvorak layout so much less frustrating ☺️

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I don't know why but I can't use my custom DVORAK-QWERTY with Atom anymore.

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I'm having the issue as well

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It seems the workaround for custom layouts has been removed:
#90 (comment)

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@Ben3eeE this is the original issue, do you want me do add details on how to reproduce it here or should I create a new issue?

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Hey!

I think it's better to open a new issue.

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