Re: [gnome-flashback] Issues with gnome-flashback on Ubuntu 16.04

[Alkis Georgopoulos <alkisg gmail com>]

On 05/12/2015 07:42 μμ, Dmitry Shachnev wrote:
> Alkis, why can't you just define your favourite shortcut as GNOME
> shortcut, and disable the X11 one? This way indicator-keyboard should
> correctly handle it.

There are two problems with it:

1) The GNOME shortcut to switch layouts doesn't work at all when an 
application grabs the keyboard. The XKB shortcut does work even then.
IMHO that's a bad design choice of GNOME, it ignored the hooks that XKB 
offers for this case.
This happens for example in some full screen applications, like e.g. 
tuxtype, tuxpaint, teeworlds etc, or a menu (like the Applications menu) 
is shown.
So students can't type Greek in tuxtype, making it useless.

2) When I press the GNOME shortcut for layout switching (or when I use 
the indicator), GNOME switches my XKB layout from "us,gr" to "gr,us" and 
vice-versa.
It's not supposed to do that. It's supposed to change the active layout 
(iso-next-group), not reload the layouts in a different order.
This confuses some applications. Previously, it was breaking the 
shortcuts (like Ctrl+A) of LibreOffice and Firefox. These are fixed now, 
but I'm sure that there were other applications or shortcuts that are 
still affected; I could locate some examples given some time.
It's also confusing the focus of some controls as it's considered a 
keystroke instead of a dead key.


I've filed a somewhat related bug report here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-settings-daemon/+bug/1315867


The last time we were able to let Xorg/XKB manage our keyboard layouts 
was in Gnome-Flashback 12.04; we didn't upgrade to 14.04 mainly because 
of GNOME breaking that.
It's still possible in Ubuntu Mate 16.04 though.

If we can't find any solution, for 16.04 I'll create a few wrappers for 
the affected applications and run the correct `setxkbmap` before and 
after launching the affected application.

Thanks!