Incorrect keyboard handling on Windows

[LinqLover]

So far, I stumbled upon the following keyboard gestures that are currently not supported in Windows:

• Alt + <letter> (e.g., for print it, do it, etc.)
• Alt + Shift + <letter> (e.g., for debug it, preferences, etc.)
• Alt + . or Ctrl + . for interrupt
• Qwertz layout specific:
  • ^ , (to type a ^)
  • Ctrl + Alt + ß for \ and the analogous shortcuts for {, [, ], }, |
• Alt + Home or Alt + End for navigation
• Just pressing Alt should not set the keyboard focus to the window bar menu of the VM

[fniephaus]

Are you sure Alt is not accidentally mapped to something else, like the Win key?

[LinqLover]

Pressing Alt + P has the same effect as pressing just P. Every key that is pressed together with Ctrl + Alt or AltGr is completely ignored. Windows shortcuts work as usual.

By the way, there are further weird things going on. This is how the keyboard exerciser looks like after typing aA1:

Typing p even raises an error because the keyCode 112 is not registered in the virtualKeyTable. It's interesting that simple typing in text editors still works at all. :-)

keyDowns look no better:

[fniephaus]

The root cause for all of this is that the OpenSmalltalkVM provides different events on different platforms and because of this, Squeak has covered this up on the image side. TruffleSqueak is very consistent because it's using Java AWT/Swing but that breaks on the image level. I guess you can tell that I don't use Windows much myself. Any contributions that makes this better are more than welcome. The KeyboardListener is actually quite simple:

trufflesqueak/src/de.hpi.swa.trufflesqueak/src/de/hpi/swa/trufflesqueak/io/SqueakKeyboard.java

Lines 15 to 73 in a068eca

	public final class SqueakKeyboard implements KeyListener {
	private final SqueakDisplay display;
	public SqueakKeyboard(final SqueakDisplay display) {
	this.display = display;
	}
	@Override
	public void keyPressed(final KeyEvent e) {
	display.recordModifiers(e);
	final int keyChar = toKeyChar(e);
	addKeyboardEvent(KEYBOARD_EVENT.DOWN, keyChar != KeyEvent.CHAR_UNDEFINED ? keyChar : e.getKeyCode());
	if (keyChar != KeyEvent.CHAR_UNDEFINED) {
	addKeyboardEvent(KEYBOARD_EVENT.CHAR, keyChar);
	}
	if (e.isMetaDown() && keyChar == '.') {
	display.image.interrupt.setInterruptPending();
	}
	}
	@Override
	public void keyTyped(final KeyEvent e) {
	/** Keyboard char events handled in keyPressed(KeyEvent). */
	}
	@Override
	public void keyReleased(final KeyEvent e) {
	display.recordModifiers(e);
	final int keyChar = toKeyChar(e);
	addKeyboardEvent(KEYBOARD_EVENT.UP, keyChar != KeyEvent.CHAR_UNDEFINED ? keyChar : e.getKeyCode());
	}
	private void addKeyboardEvent(final long eventType, final int keyCharOrCode) {
	display.addEvent(EVENT_TYPE.KEYBOARD, keyCharOrCode, eventType, display.buttons >> 3, keyCharOrCode);
	}
	private static int toKeyChar(final KeyEvent e) {
	//@formatter:off
	switch(e.getKeyCode()) { // Handle special keys.
	case KeyEvent.VK_BACK_SPACE: return 8;
	case KeyEvent.VK_TAB: return 9;
	case KeyEvent.VK_ENTER: return 13;
	case KeyEvent.VK_ESCAPE: return 27;
	case KeyEvent.VK_SPACE: return 32;
	case KeyEvent.VK_PAGE_UP: return 11;
	case KeyEvent.VK_PAGE_DOWN: return 12;
	case KeyEvent.VK_END: return 4;
	case KeyEvent.VK_HOME: return 1;
	case KeyEvent.VK_LEFT: return 28;
	case KeyEvent.VK_UP: return 30;
	case KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT: return 29;
	case KeyEvent.VK_DOWN: return 31;
	case KeyEvent.VK_INSERT: return 5;
	case KeyEvent.VK_DELETE: return 127;
	default: return e.getKeyChar();
	}
	//@formatter:on
	}
	}

[LinqLover]

Thanks for the pointers. So I'm no longer confused that most of these shortcuts do not work in WSL/VcXsrv either. If the problem might be on the image side, I'll also talk with @marceltaeumel about it. :-)

[fniephaus]

We once thought about letting TruffleSqueak always prepend to run on Linux because of this. But then you of course run into many other problems (e.g., when trying to access the file system with the wrong delimiters).

[LinqLover]

Hm ... maybe we should introduce a new "omniplatform" type on the image side? SqueakJS might benefit from that as well.

[fniephaus]

Yes, that'd be nice!

[fniephaus]

FWIW, I just pushed 8b03140 which also seems to fix some of the other items on your list.

[LinqLover]

Great!

…

________________________________ From: Fabio Niephaus ***@***.***> Sent: Monday, December 18, 2023 12:09:10 AM To: hpi-swa/trufflesqueak ***@***.***> Cc: Christoph Thiede ***@***.***>; Author ***@***.***> Subject: Re: [hpi-swa/trufflesqueak] Incorrect keyboard handling on Windows (Issue #160) FWIW, I just pushed 8b03140<8b03140> which also seems to fix some of the other items on your list. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#160 (comment)>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AJH4PSUAHVLZ4KXL35ONIKDYJ53RNAVCNFSM5W5R4U72U5DIOJSWCZC7NNSXTN2JONZXKZKDN5WW2ZLOOQ5TCOBVHEZTCNRXGI3A>. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>