keylayout output is invalid: breaks macos conventions and angle-mod

[thblt]

Keylayout output with angle mod swaps the leftmost key of the numeric row with the key next to the left shift. In the above image (screenshot from ukulele showing the angle-modded ergol layout), the Z on row 2, column 1 should be swapped with the backtick on column 2 of row 4.

[fabi1cazenave]

It’s an old story: some Mac keyboards swap the Grave and ISO keys physically, and so far no macOS user has ever provided any patch or explanation for that.

It’s unclear to me why this affects only some keyboards but not others.
Or maybe there’s a setting on the OS side (= Mac keyboard vs standard ISO keyboard), but I’m not using macOS so I don’t know.

Would you mind giving a bit more info?

• What exact keyboard model are you using here?
• How does it behave with an external ISO keyboard?

[fabi1cazenave]

Likely a duplicate of #210

[fabi1cazenave]

Silly question: is the non-angle-mod output valid for your keyboard?

[thblt]

I was going to check this. I’ll do a few tests with a few different keyboards and report. 

[fabi1cazenave]

Thanks, that’s very appreciated.

[thblt]

Far from a complete test, but indeed the issue seems unrelated to --angle-mod: the regular ergol layout swaps those same two keys.

A bit of context. AFAIU, all Apple keyboards swap those two keys (because Macs are not IBM PCs. The OS compensates for this with the keyboard identification dialog, that allows it to use regular PC keyboards as well as third-party mac keyboards without issue.

(This causes issues with programs such as kanata, probably because the karabiner kernel extension kanata uses hijack this mechanism. But for a layout it shouldn’t be an issue.)

IMO the solution is probably just to swap the two corresponding codes in the keylayout exporter. I’ll check the code and see if I can locate the corresponding part

[thblt]

Untested yet, but this seems to work. main...thblt:kalamine:main

[thblt]

A bit of context. AFAIU, all Apple keyboards swap those two keys ...

Self-correction: If Ukelele is correct, it’s actually a bit trickier. The swap only happens in Apple ISO keyboards.

This is the base Apple AZERTY rendered by Ukelele on first an ISO, then an ANSI keyboard.

For Ergol, this means that with my patch applied, the position of the <> key will change on an ANSI keyboard, which seems to me to be a reasonable compromise --- especially at this is how stock layouts behave on mac

[fabi1cazenave]

The swap only happens in Apple ISO keyboards.

I’m not sure ISO is the proper term here.

• What’s the exact name of Apple’s Qwerty-intl keyboard, which I know swaps the TLDE and LSGT key (= xkb names)?
• What’s the exact name of Apple’s Azerty keyboard?
• What happens if you connect a non-Apple ISO keyboard?

The latter is the only one I’d call an ISO keyboard. I would be surprised (or very disappointed) if those Apple keebs with two swapped keys qualified as ISO. Using sharp terms would be a good first step. :-)

[fabi1cazenave]

For Ergol, this means that with my patch applied, the position of the <> key will change on an ANSI keyboard, which seems to me to be a reasonable compromise --- especially at this is how stock layouts behave on mac

That might be an acceptable compromise for Ergol, but it wouldn’t for other layouts (e.g. Bépo). The goal is is to fix this once and for all, not to keep working around it.

I’d really like to know what happens if a real ISO keyboard is connected to a Mac.

Does the Bépo keylayout have the same issue?

[thblt]

• What’s the exact name of Apple’s Qwerty-intl keyboard, which I know swaps the TLDE and LSGT key (= xkb names)?
• What’s the exact name of Apple’s Azerty keyboard?

What do you mean by name? They have Apple product codes and USB vendor/product IDs, but I doubt they have anything beyond their commercial names. Specifically, I don't think there's a common name for all instances of a given physical layout/marking across various product lines.

What happens if you connect a non-Apple ISO keyboard?

They behave exactly the same as an Apple keyboard with the same physical layout (ISO or ISO-ish). I tried that with a Dell ISO keyboard I had at hand: macOS compensates for the scancode peculiarities (the same way the Linux kernel does when it sees Apple keyboards)

[thblt]

The goal is is to fix this once and for all, not to keep working around it.

I'm afraid this is an intrinsic property of the way macOS handles the various physical layout it knows.

Does the Bépo keylayout have the same issue?

I can check later; but AFAICT even Apple stock layouts behave this way (the backtick "moves" to the ISO key if the keyboard has it instead of the ISO key being a new, distinct code)

(Late edit: fwiw, optimot solves this by distributing two separate implementations, labelled ANSI and ISO)