DEV Community

[Comment from a deleted post]
Collapse
 
davidolrik profile image
David Jack Wange Olrik

I'm danish and also use dead keys, and I have the same behavior in all of my applications.

The merging of back ticks into the following character is the desired effect, as it makes it possible to write characters like these: éáèà as you write your self.

The wierd spacing however could be a bug, but it's not something I can reproduce in vscode on the mac.

Your current setup should work just fine for coding+english+french, you just need to press back-tick + space when you want a single back-tick.

 
samuelfaure profile image
Samuel-Zacharie FAURE • Edited

Indeed the backtick key ` can be used to write letters such as à, è, ect.

However this is obviously not what I consider a bug. Consider instead that on VSCode:

1/ The backtick merge with just any character. This is not supposed to happen. If I type backticks and "g" on a normal app, I get this : `g

2/ It is impossible to avoid, it will always merge with the following chars, whereas right now I can double press the backtick key to get actual backticks : ``a => This is not merging with a, because I don't want it to. My browser is therefore working correctly.

3/ It displays sentences wrongly, when backticks are surrounding the text, such as this : hello world. As you can read in my issue, the file and its backticks will be, however, correctly displayed in Vim or any other editor.

4/ The weird spacing thing.

I must confess I am very confused as to how you could think the problem would be that I don't know how to use an US INTL keyboard. I mean, I've been using it for five years as a professional developer, my boss would probably fire me if I didn't know how to type with a keyboard ;-)

 
davidolrik profile image
David Jack Wange Olrik

I guess from the way you described how you use dead keys, it sounded like you didn't know the "correct" way to get get the result you want or maybe that your computer was configured in a weird way that is causing you trouble.

I would never "double press backtick" as that would leave the last backtick in "modifier-mode" and depending on what character you type next it would merge or not.

E.g. your example of "back-tick, back-tick, a" should result in à and not`a as you describe (provided that your dead key setup is functioning properly).

The proper/best way to type a back-tick on a keyboard with dead keys is "back-tick + space" - and that should work in any app.

Looking closer at your screen capture, it looks like your back-ticks are transformed into a completely different set of characters when you type two back-ticks in a row.

Does back-tick + space work for you?

 
samuelfaure profile image
Samuel-Zacharie FAURE

Errata : the issue seems to not have originated from VSCode but from a bad font on my side. Strange that it only acted like this with VSCode, but that was definitely not their fault !

 
davidolrik profile image
David Jack Wange Olrik

Great that you figured out what the issue was!