I have a Latvian(apostrophe) keyboard layout.
Somewhere around kde 5.20 the behaviour of the apostrophe(") key changed.
Some context: In my language there are accented characters (ā ē ī etc.) and to access them I need to press '(apostrophe key, no shift) and the letter to get the accented variant.
And around KDE version 5.19 pressing shift and the apostrophe key resulted in the quote symbol ("), and no special treatment.
But, after a recent update (5.20 or 5.21 on kde plasma) it changed.
Now, no matter if I press the key with or without the shift it toggles the accented mode, witch is quite annoying for programming.
Before: Shift+" abc results in "abc Now:ābc (notice that for the same inputs, it ignored the quote alltogether and just accented the character)
Before: Shift+" Shift+" results in "" (two quotes) Now:" (single quote, and the next character that I type will be accented)
I would guess that this is a problem of some package that handles layouts, but because of the amount of packages that changed before my live USB(where the old(desired) behaviour happens) and now, I am am unsure where to start.
The most locale issues you in this forum is related to KDE - with a long shot until you hit Gnome as second. Just try a search using keywords KDElocale - you will be surprised - maybe add in Plasma keyword - and I will not be surprised if you find a solution in there.
I found an another Latvian layout that has the quote behaviour that I want. That being Latvian (Colemark with apostrophe)
After finding where the file for the layouts were stored (/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/lv), I narrowed down the difference to this line: key <AC11> {[ISO_Level3_Latch, ISO_Level3_Latch, apostrophe, quotedbl]}; key <AC11> {[ISO_Level3_Latch, quotedbl, apostrophe, quotedbl]};
With the latter being desiered.
I was planning to do a git blame and see if this was a recent change, but I am already over my head and could not even track down the source code.
So the question is… can I edit the current or create a custom layout that has the needed behaviour?
I would try editing the file directly, but looking at the wiki there is also a metadata file somewhere that I would probably need to change?
I opened the older image available for download at Manjaro - KDE Plasma in a VM, and it has the desired apostrophe behaviour defined at /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/lv
So I guess it was an intended change. not that I like it…
But I guess I can’t complain too much. I will just change it to the original once in awhile when a new update inevitably breaks my patch.
Update: The solution works. All you have to do is change lines 115 and 116 to those shown in commit.