[Rd] Regression in 4.2.0: unable to type special characters in Windows RGui

[Cesko Voeten]

Hi Tomas,

>>  - Some accents don't work. For instance, pressing 'a produces ã, but pressing 'a produces 'a rather than á. From my testing, `^~ seem to work as expected, but '" don't.
> 
> I could reproduce this on the US International keyboard and it is fixed now. There may be missing support for more accents, so if you or anyone else find about them, please let me know.
> 
>>  - Nonexistent deadkey combinations are handled differently from native Windows. For example, typing ~^ should output ~^, but produces nothing. Typing ~^a should output ~^a, but actually yields ~â. So it seems that the first ~ is correctly translated to the tilde symbol, but simultaneously the second ^ is being treated as a new deadkey press, which other Windows programs don't do in this case.
> Thanks, fixed now. It was another bug in the old code, plus a "feature" I added that by pressing e.g. the dead-key apostrophe twice you get it printed only once (this is what Linux does and I find it more natural). But I made it now to work as usual on Windows.
>>  - Related to the above two issues, '& should produce '&, while it only gives &. This again affects only '" --- something like ^& correctly produces ^&.
> 
> It should be fixed by now as well.
> 
> The fixes are in 82332 (R-patched) and 82331 (R-devel). If you could test again after the snapshot build gets there, that would be great. It is easy to miss something.
> 
> When testing now, I've been using http://kbdlayout.info/ as a reference for several keyboard layouts on Windows, to find how to type different dead-keys. That can give you also names of the deadkeys, which can be easily communicated without having to copy-paste from the Rgui window. On some layouts, additional deadkeys are available with right Alt (AltGr).

Everything indeed seems fixed on today's R-devel build. I haven't noticed any other behavior that is different from what I was normally expecting on Windows.

>> Also, I'm noticing only now that selecting typed text in RGui and pressing Ctrl deletes that text, so trying to Ctrl+C text that I typed is kind of awkward. But this might simply be a feature that I wasn't aware of before.
> 
> Interesting. It isn't happening on my system, but I can't tell whether it is a "feature" under some circumstances. Maybe you can try to find out more about this: whether it is repeatable, whether it depends on some setting, whether it was happening also in R 4.1, etc.

I haven't been able to reproduce this, so this was probably a glitch on my end (PEBKAC?) or a transient issue in R-devel that has been resolved since.

Thank you for your hard work! Now I'm really looking forward to R 4.2.1 :)

Cesko