Windows - US International keyboard layout modifier (dead keys) don't correctly register

[kdevnel]

Description

It appears when you have US International keyboard layouts active in Windows that the modifier keys (pressing either ' or ` on a US layout keyboard, followed by a letter such as e should then output either é or è) don't register correctly if you want to output the actual symbol character (usually done by clicking modifier + space).

Instead, it appears the editor outputs a space character only.

Step-by-step reproduction instructions

1. Ensure you have US International keyboard selected in Windows (I tested with a US layout keyboard with US Internation selected in language settings)
2. Create a new page or post
3. Try out ' then e which should correctly output é
4. Try out ' then space which should output the ' character but instead a space character is output instead.

Screenshots, screen recording, code snippet

Environment info

No response

Please confirm that you have searched existing issues in the repo.

Yes

Please confirm that you have tested with all plugins deactivated except Gutenberg.

No

[Flameeyes]

Looking at the history, I think e2e3f6b is probably related.
AIUI this uses the KeyboardEvent API that has specific behaviour for dead keys: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEvent/key

(If that is the case, this may have the same problem on other non-Windows OSes, I just can't test that. macOS has an "US International (PC)" keyboard that uses dead keys the way Windows does, in Linux that's the US layout with alt-intl option.

[kdevnel]

macOS has an "US International (PC)" keyboard that uses dead keys the way Windows does

Just to add for context, I tested this with the US International (PC) on macOS and the behaviour of the dead keys is slightly different to how Windows handles them. The issue reported didn't happen in macOS for me, only on Windows.

The slight difference seems to be that in macOS, the first press of the modifier outputs a placeholder character that is then replaced with the final character on the second keypress. In Windows, the first press of the modifier doesn't output anything at all.

[Flameeyes]

So here's a JSFiddle that might be useful: http://jsfiddle.net/r8dMu/

The combination for á reports:

down   222 de Þ
up     222 de Þ
down   65 41 A
press  225 e1 á
up     65 41 A

While for ' it is:

down   222 de Þ
down   32 20  
press  39 27 '
up     222 de Þ
up     32 20  

You can see that there's five events for each character, because dead keys don't map 1-to-1 between keys and symbols. Most importantly the keydown/keyup don't match the press. Now, keypress is deprecated, so clearly this is not what is being used now.

But my JavaScript-fu is limited, @ellatrix any chance you have ideas on what may be causing this behaviour or a suggestion how to get this fixed quickly?

[simison]

Cc @ellatrix @youknowriad

[Flameeyes]

Further testing: this does not appear to affect Chrome on Android (of all things!). The output of the fiddle is (missing the last character because I'm manually re-typing), for á:

down 229 e5
up 229 e5

and for ':

down 229 e5
up 229 e5
up 32 20

[ellatrix]

Could you describe step by step what you're tying, what you're getting, and what you're expecting? You don't get the desired character after pressing space?

I tried on Mac and Chrome, Alt+´ works well.

[Flameeyes]

Could you describe step by step what you're tying, what you're getting, and what you're expecting? You don't get the desired character after pressing space?

Prerequisite: this is a report for Windows with the US International keyboard layout. Not Mac, not Android.

Using the US International layout, pressing a number of diacritical marks by themselves (no Alt, no Option, no Ctrl, no Compose) causes them to be interpreted as dead keys. That's true for `, ' ,", ~, ^.

Typing one of them following by a compatible letters should replace them with the appropriate codepoint, so for instance:

• `a ⇒ à
• ~n ⇒ ñ
• "O ⇒ Ö

And to insert the actual diacritical mark, you type the dead key followed by SPACE;

• "SPACE ⇒ "

This works everywhere: GitHub right now, Google Docs, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Gutenberg as of August, …

Except Gutenberg as of September.

I tried on Mac and Chrome, Alt+´ works well.

That is not what this report is about.

[Flameeyes]

Making sure that this issue is not considering "dormant" just because nobody said anything in a month.

[Flameeyes]

@youknowriad you may want to tag this as Regression as well — this works perfectly fine on older Gutenberg.

[Mamaduka]

I'm removing this issue from WP 5.9 project board since RC1 was released last night.

Let's try and land a fix for this in a minor release.

[Flameeyes]

I guess I'll have to just stop using WordPress once 5.9 releases then.

I have to say I'm unimpressed by this whole experience. It's a clear, reproducible bug, affecting a major operating system (Windows!), and I even tracked down when the regression was introduced, but the only attention I got from developers has been looking at the wrong operating system.

Once again I feel that what killed blogging is not the death of Google Reader, but the rotting of writing options https://flameeyes.blog/2021/10/05/reader-is-dead-but-what-about-writers/

[mcsf]

@Flameeyes: I am sorry about this one falling through the cracks and how it's impacting you.

I just spent the last couple of hours redoing my virtual machine setup (Win 10 VM guest on a macOS host with access to the host's dev server) and I can reproduce this issue. The expert in this domain, @ellatrix, is on leave, so we'll see if we can find a solution for this in the meantime.

[liamrosen]

Thanks, everyone who has been a squeaky wheel on this. I basically compose all of my Wordpress posts in Notepad++ at this point...

Looking forward to a fix soon!

[mcsf]

I've tracked it down to #30244.