Dead keys not working in Emacs [Lucid]

[oyvinst]

Hi,

I'm having trouble with dead keys in Emacs on Ubuntu Lucid and I'm at my wits' end. Using a standard Norwegian keyboard layout, and dead keys work fine in all Gnome applications. But Emacs just spits out messages about undefined keybindings when I use dead key combinations, for instance for tilde (~): “<dead_tilde> is undefined”. This is super-annoying, since I use Emacs a lot, and I need some way to fix this.

What I've tried so far:

• Loading the 'iso-transl' library in Emacs seemingly makes the dead keys work, but it's not consistent across modes (works for plain text, though), and I didn't need to do this before. Also, loading this breaks Emacs' latin-1-prefix input method, for some reason.
• Fiddling with keyboard-preferences, iBus, im-switch xim/none/ibus, etc.
• Removing ~/.xinput.d directory.
• Fiddling with various environment variables: GTK_IM_METHOD, GTK_IM_MODULES, XMODIFIERS

Of course, I'm testing this in Emacs started with '-Q' to elminiate problems that might be caused by my own rather extensive set of initialization files. Using dead keys in Emacs has never been a problem until I upgraded to Ubuntu Lucid.

[mrb@hsdev.com]

I'm having the exact same issue. Not being able to input characters like 'é' and especially '~' is indeed very annoying.

I gave up for now and created workaround by adding a 'non-dead-key' extra keyboard layout (with checkbox 'layout per window' set to 'on'), so I can at least enter plain ' and " characters in emacs and have the dead keys in all other windows.

[oyvinst]

I'm having the exact same issue. Not being able to input characters like 'é' and especially '~' is indeed very annoying.

I gave up for now and created workaround by adding a 'non-dead-key' extra keyboard layout (with checkbox 'layout per window' set to 'on'), so I can at least enter plain ' and " characters in emacs and have the dead keys in all other windows.

Looks like I tracked down this bastard of an issue, but it took me some hours of work ! The whole story is explained in the follwing bug, which I just filed:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/575084

Basically, Emacs doesn't properly understand the locale set by gnome-language-selector (which is stored in file ~/.dmrc and set upon login from GDM), and dead keys stop working as a result.

The fix:

sed -i 's/utf8/UTF-8/' ~/.dmrc

Then log out and back in. Let me know if it works for you, and I can set this thread to SOLVED.

[mrb@hsdev.com]

It's a bit different here.

1. I originally had no ~/.dmrc -> problem remains
2. ran gnome-language-sector
~/.dmrc does indeed get nl_NL.utf8
3. logged out/in -> problem remains
4. changed to nl_NL.UTF-8 -> problem remains
5. Logged out, chose English as language on login -> SOLVED

rechecked ~/.dmrc after that, and English locale is specified as 'en_US.utf8'

So, the issue is perhaps a bit more subtle than your analysis?

[oyvinst]

It's a bit different here.

1. I originally had no ~/.dmrc -> problem remains
2. ran gnome-language-sector
~/.dmrc does indeed get nl_NL.utf8
3. logged out/in -> problem remains
4. changed to nl_NL.UTF-8 -> problem remains
5. Logged out, chose English as language on login -> SOLVED

rechecked ~/.dmrc after that, and English locale is specified as 'en_US.utf8'

So, the issue is perhaps a bit more subtle than your analysis?

Perhaps, yes, might even be locale-specific or a combo of keyboard input method and locale. I only tested this for Norwegian UTF-8 locale. But the important thing here is what your LANG variable eventually ends up containing. What does your LANG variable contain (not value in ~/.dmrc) when Emacs works ?

Invoke Emacs with different alternatives for LANG and see which of them makes or breaks dead keys:

$ LANG=nl_NL.utf8 emacs
$ LANG=nl_NL.UTF-8 emacs
$ LANG=en_US.utf8 emacs
$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 emacs

Would be interesting to know. Emacs might be buggy in interpreting locale in general. Or there might be issues with installed locales.

[mrb@hsdev.com]

Surprisingly, emacs does now work with all of them. It is definitely influenced by the language/translation packages and keyboard layouts.

This has now turned into another problem for me: How to get the default keyboard layout to have dead keys, as on selection, the system throws an error at me: 'Error activating XKB configuration'