Switching keyboard languages counts as pressing space?
Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2019 4:05 pm
Yes, I know I should, before a race, make sure I've set my keyboard layout to the language I want to type in but... sometimes I have forgotten to check which keyboard layout was active, and then I couldn't cycle through the list of keyboard layouts because the shortcut for that is Windows-space (on Linux, I think I read it's control-space on Windows). I've completed at least two tests where I had to type Danish on a Spanish keyboard layout. Because if I switched to Danish qwerty with the keyboard shortcut, I'd get a couple of "wrong words" because, apparently, 10ff sees it as pressing space. By contrast, I pressed that keyboard shortcut a couple of times while writing this message, and it didn't output any characters.
I've also sometimes just reloaded the page after switching languages, but now I try not to do that. If I start and the keyboard is in the wrong language, I just use that layout if I can. And I'm on Linux, where the Danish letters Æ, Ø and Å can be typed on the Spanish layout, although Å requires the same number of keypresses as Ü.
Of course, a workaround might be to type a word, not press space, then press the keyboard shortcut to switch layouts... which works if no language you cycle through uses a different alphabet (or you could use alt codes even for unaccented letters, but that would be really slow). Or use the mouse, which means moving the hands away from the keyboard.
Could it be made so that a keypress that doesn't type a space doesn't advance to the next word? I know it's probably easier to check where on the keyboard a key is than which character it's typing, but keypresses that don't write anything can be treated as not writing anything, that would make it easier for those who use different layouts for different languages to get more accurate scores.
(In case it matters, the Linux distro I use is Ubuntu, and the browser is Firefox, but I asked on the discord server and it seems not to be a Linux thing)
I've also sometimes just reloaded the page after switching languages, but now I try not to do that. If I start and the keyboard is in the wrong language, I just use that layout if I can. And I'm on Linux, where the Danish letters Æ, Ø and Å can be typed on the Spanish layout, although Å requires the same number of keypresses as Ü.
Of course, a workaround might be to type a word, not press space, then press the keyboard shortcut to switch layouts... which works if no language you cycle through uses a different alphabet (or you could use alt codes even for unaccented letters, but that would be really slow). Or use the mouse, which means moving the hands away from the keyboard.
Could it be made so that a keypress that doesn't type a space doesn't advance to the next word? I know it's probably easier to check where on the keyboard a key is than which character it's typing, but keypresses that don't write anything can be treated as not writing anything, that would make it easier for those who use different layouts for different languages to get more accurate scores.
(In case it matters, the Linux distro I use is Ubuntu, and the browser is Firefox, but I asked on the discord server and it seems not to be a Linux thing)