Add support for Dvorak keyboards

Description of the bug
All keyboard shortcuts that use the OPTION key on Mac don’t respect the keyboard layout (Dvorak in my case). In other words, I have to press the QWERTY keys for OPT + C (column view), OPT + G (graph view), etc. rather than the Dvorak ones.

Device, App & Version
v3.2.0 macOS

Steps to reproduce
Change your keyboard mapping to a non-QUERTY and use one of the OPT keyboard shortcuts.

Screenshots / Screen Recording
N/A

Thanks for the report @JamesT, we’ll look into why this is happening and see what we can do :slight_smile:

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Hi @JamesT, we looked into this further today and had an in-depth discussion about how to move forward with this. The reason is that this is happening is that since the change to using ‘Alt’ modifier keys we have to rely on keyCodes which represents the physical key pressed, not the character it types (this is only for the Alt keybinds).

We have too many different keyboard shortcuts at this point, so the best solution is to add Customisable Keyboard Shortcuts rather than constantly try to swap them around for different users as everyone has different setups. This also opens up the opportunity to add VIM keybindings which has over 20 likes!

As you can imagine adding Customisable Keyboard Shortcuts isn’t the most trivial task so it might be a little while until we get this out. In the meantime, while the keyboard shortcuts are the wrong letters on Dvorak, if you press their Qwerty counterpart the shortcut should still work as intended.

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@Tobias Thank you for sharing a detailed explanation of the problem and your reasoning around fixing it via customisable shortcuts.

I can live with remembering to use the QWERTY shortcuts for now—as I patiently wait for the new feature. :slightly_smiling_face:

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@Tobias I’m not sure if this is related to the same change, but OPTION + SPACE no longer adds or removes a card from the pinned panel for me.

Hi @JamesT, thanks for letting us know. In the meantime you can just hold Alt / Option + Click on the titles to pin & unpin

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This issue makes some of the built-in keyboard shortcuts confusing and some unusable. It looks as though offering custom keyboard shortcuts is under consideration, and that may fix it. I’m posting this in case it wouldn’t. The issue may affect anyone using a keyboard layout that uses AltGr, though the underlying OS platform might make a difference. It would be nice if all the SN shortcuts as listed on the cheat sheet could reflect the actual keys used to produce the desired effects as the keys are named in the currently-configured keyboard layout. (Not necessarily as the physical keycaps may show.)

I’m using an international keyboard layout on Linux, specifically Spanish Dvorak. It uses an AltGr key to access a number of characters, including #. Also other keys like / are in different places, sometimes requiring a modifier like shift. With this situation, the shortcuts cheat sheet is sometimes correct, sometimes not. This affects usability.

For example, when I try to type a # to add a tag, I begin the key combination with AltGr. But pressing that alone pins or unpins the card, with the result that # is inaccessible for tagging. Instead, it starts the title of a new card. In the context of editing a card, pressing #, as for headings, works as expected.

A different example: when I toggle the shortcuts cheat sheet, I do press Ctrl+Shift first, but the shift works in combination with 7 to produce “/”. So in one sense the cheat sheet is correct (Ctrl+Shift+/), but with this keyboard, it’s really Ctrl+Shift+7.

There are other examples, but this may suffice to illustrate the issue.

Hi @fiftieth, thanks for the thorough feedback!

I’ve merged this request with an existing one to add support for Dvorak, and as you mentioned – custom keyboard shortcuts should be the ideal solution to this. We’ll see what we can do.