Typing keyboard layout name disrupted by instant change of layout

Triaged to Confirmed. Another reported noticed the same problem trying to select French keyboard with Fr. I'm not sure if there is a single keystroke delay that will work for all hardware because of the wide array of PC's that Ubuntu is installed on. Ubiquity dialog needs to change to address this issue: Type the first letter of the keyboard language then scroll to select keyboard.

What an excellent bug report. I'd never thought of this problem!

There's no way to stop GTK from changing the selection in the keyboard layout and variant views during keyboard navigation. Currently the keyboard layout is changed when the 'changed' signal is emitted on the tree selection. I think the best approach would be to change the keyboard layout when either of the following events happen:

  * the 'focus-out-event' signal is emitted on either tree view widget (either by tabbing to or selecting another widget, or (I think) by alt-tabbing to another window);
  * the Forward button is pressed (either directly or by activating a row in either tree view widget).

This should arrange to change the layout when it actually needs to be used, but without interfering with keyboard navigation.

So Colin, what you are saying is that this is GTK behavior, and it's not easy to change, but by changing the way ubiquity interacts with GTK we can make a work around. What I don't understand is that if I have a long list of files displayed in Nautilus and I quickly type in a few characters, the selection highlight always goes to the first letter typed. Regardless of how quickly I type, the first letter, say "F" will tag a file beginning with F. If I type "F (delay) r" then it will not jump to a file beginning with "r". This is a common problem with cell phone interfaces when searching for a contact.

The highlight selection process that works in Nautilus must be different than the highlight keyboard-language selection process in ubiquity.

The reason that nautilus is different is that it doesn't change the keyboard layout while you're trying to type.

Any delay problems are not the same as this bug ...

On reflection, I think this should come off the release-critical list for Hardy (so Won't Fix for Hardy, but remains Triaged for mainline). My reason here is that if we only change the keyboard layout on focus-out-event then somebody who tabs to the test entry box and then immediately starts typing is likely to get the wrong layout for a little while, which might be just as confusing.

I think we should still fix this, but I'd like to do it at a little more leisure so that we have a chance to process feedback. Sorry it didn't make it to the top of the list for 8.04.

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]