<i18n dev> <AWT Dev> The input method handling

[Eirik Bakke]

Passing by--maybe the following piece of NetBeans Platform documentation
has relevance:

http://wiki.netbeans.org/DevFaqLogicalKeybindings


Quote: "There should be no Alt-bound keyboard shortcuts on Macintosh, ever
- it is used on international keyboards as the compose key (for a long
time, we didn't know it, but Norwegian and French users could not type }
or { in NetBeans - kind of limits the usefuless of a Java IDE)."


I'm on MacOS now, on a US keyboard, and in fact, most alt+key combinations
do produce valid characters (e.g. asdf=åߏŸ). On non-US keyboards, these
combinations might be the only way to produce certain "common" characters
(e.g. {}, as the NetBeans page mentions).

I'm not familiar with JDK internals, so my apologies if the observations
above are not relevant here.

-- Eirik

On 12/10/14, 12:56 PM, "Sergey Malenkov" <malenkov at gmail.com> wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>In Oracle JDK the input method handling is slightly different from
>Apple JDK. And this is a reason of some issues in IntelliJ IDEA. I
>found out that the insertText method in the following file uses
>lengthOfBytesUsingEncoding instead of length in characters:
>
>http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk9/dev/jdk/file/e5b66323ae45/src/java.desktop
>/macosx/native/libawt_lwawt/awt/AWTView.m
>
>This means that almost every Alt+Key combination generates
>InputMethodEvent instead of pair of KeyEvent for PRESSED and TYPED. It
>makes impossible to support custom shortcuts for all Alt+Key and
>Shift+Alt+Key combinations on Mac, what is one of the reasons why
>users do not want to migrate from Apple JDK to Oracle JDK on Mac.
>
>I suggest to apply the following patch to the AWTView.m file:
>
>--- a/src/macosx/native/sun/awt/AWTView.m Wed Dec 10 17:20:48 2014 +0400
>+++ b/src/macosx/native/sun/awt/AWTView.m Wed Dec 10 19:51:56 2014 +0300
>@@ -889,7 +889,7 @@
>     // text, or 'text in progress'.  We also need to send the event
>if we get an insert text out of the blue!
>     // (i.e., when the user uses the Character palette or Inkwell),
>or when the string to insert is a complex
>     // Unicode value.
>-    NSUInteger utf8Length = [aString
>lengthOfBytesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
>+    NSUInteger utf8Length = [aString length];
>
>     if ([self hasMarkedText] || !fProcessingKeystroke || (utf8Length >
>1)) {
>         JNIEnv *env = [ThreadUtilities getJNIEnv];
>
>It makes the input method handling  more compatible with Apple JDK and
>allows us to provide users the same behavior with Oracle JDK.
>
>Do you have any objections?
>Are there some hidden pitfalls?
>
>-- 
>Best regards,
>Sergey A. Malenkov
>JetBrains