Commands mapped to parenthesis or brackets don't work on Nordic keyboards

[NordicAngel]

Summary

On a Nordic keyboard (in my case danish but I think Sweden and Norway use the same layout) there are problems with accessing commands that are mapped to parenthesis or brackets e.g. rotate_selections_backward ( or add_newline_below ]. I think this is do to these characters being placed on the number keys i.e. I have to press shift-8 for an open parenthesis or alt gr-8 for a open bracket. If I try to use ( in normal mode it reads it as shift-( and I'm not even sure it can read my brackets. The commands switch_to_lowercase and switch_to_uppercase work even though I also need shift to access backtick, but they still read as shift-`.

I have gotten the reading by recording macros.

Reproduction Steps

No response

Helix log

No response

Platform

Windows

Terminal Emulator

windows cmd

Helix Version

helix 22.12 (96ff64a)

[CptPotato]

I'm using a German keyboard layout and faced similar issues with helix on windows. The parenthesis/brackets mapping seems to be the same as on your layout (Shift8 / AltGr8). Using ( / ) to rotate selections works fine for me, but AltGr bindings register as CtrlAlt....

I managed to work around this, by adjusting some bindings. For example, here's the "unimpaired" bindings remapped:

"C-A-[" = { d = "goto_prev_diag", D = "goto_first_diag", f = "goto_prev_function", c = "goto_prev_class", a = "goto_prev_parameter", o = "goto_prev_comment", p = "goto_prev_paragraph", space = "add_newline_above", d = "goto_next_diag" }
"C-A-]" = { d = "goto_next_diag", D = "goto_last_diag", f = "goto_next_function", c = "goto_next_class", a = "goto_next_parameter", o = "goto_next_comment", t = "goto_next_test", t = "goto_prev_test", p = "goto_next_paragraph", space = "add_newline_below" }

[pascalkuthe]

As a german I highlight recommend switching away from nordic/german keyboards for CS they wrack your hands with they gymnastics you have to perform to type brackets.

That said it would be good to fix this in helix although I am not sure if that's possible. neovim/neovim#11061 might be related

[CptPotato]

As a german I highlight recommend switching away from nordic/german keyboards for CS they wrack your hands with they gymnastics you have to perform to type brackets.

I agree, especially {[]} with right AltGr is a mess, whereas using CtrlAlt it's not that bad. I actually bound the unmpaired keys to ö/ä for consistency with the default layout. Getting used to all the special keys on a US layout would be a nightmare for me though, so that's about the best I can do.
In the future I intend to switch to a custom colemak layout where I've duplicated some awkward to type characters to AltGr + left hand, but I haven't tried this extensively.

Anyway, to get back on topic. I think switching to termwiz is being considered, which might fix the issue with [ being picked up as C-A-[.

[the-mikedavis]

I don't have a keyboard to test it but #4939 may fix the detection for these on terminals that support the enhanced keyboard protocol.

[NordicAngel]

I have already done something akin to what @CptPotato suggested and bound some of the conflicts to æ and ø instead of [ and ]. I mostly thought it would I'd raise the issue so people was aware that some key binding won't work on all keyboards as I imagine it can be an easily missed issue. I am new to terminal base editors so I appreciate the help, thanks.

[CptPotato]

I don't have a keyboard to test it but #4939 may fix the detection for these on terminals that support the enhanced keyboard protocol.

I gave the enable-keycode-disambiguation branch a try, but it did not help with this specific issue in both Wezterm and Cmd (on Windows). It's possible that this "keyboard enhancement" feature is not available with those terminals.