Old 02-04-2022, 03:58 AM   #1
inoto
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Default 'Alt Gr' not recognized in Reaper

The AltGr key (aka the Alt key to the right of space) is a modifier that is used in many languages for typing additional characters.

Most programs support this functionality and treat AltGr as a distinct key press, but Reaper doesn't and treats it as Ctrl+Alt.


It's not the end of the world (that's why I'm posting it here), but it's still annoying.
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Old 02-04-2022, 05:04 AM   #2
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Afaik, AltGr is the combination of Ctrl+Alt. It just isn't shown as such in other programs, but internally it's still treated as such.
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Old 02-04-2022, 07:05 AM   #3
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Nope, they're not the same, although it's true that some programs (including Reaper) treat them the same.

An example of a program that distinguishes between Ctrl+Alt and AltGr is Notepad++.
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Old 02-04-2022, 11:48 AM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by inoto View Post
Nope, they're not the same, although it's true that some programs (including Reaper) treat them the same.

An example of a program that distinguishes between Ctrl+Alt and AltGr is Notepad++.
Does not this depend on the particular keyboard layout? I have Swedish keyboard here, and in NP++8.3, AltGr+key gives exactly the same as Ctrl+Alt+key.
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Old 02-04-2022, 05:47 PM   #5
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Quote:
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Does not this depend on the particular keyboard layout?
In theory, it could (the developers can do whatever), but it really shouldn't. It can be used as a way to avoid some common shortcut-character collisions in some languages, but it's not the proper way to do it and you can't deal with custom layouts and stuff.


Quote:
I have Swedish keyboard here, and in NP++8.3, AltGr+key gives exactly the same as Ctrl+Alt+key.
How are you testing it? Because to test this properly you need to use a key that is used both for a program shortcut and for a special character.
Try to map some function in NP++ to Ctrl+Alt+E (since AltGr+E is used for €).
Then press Ctrl+Alt+E and AltGr+E and see if there's a difference.
In my case there is, regardless of what keyboard language/layout I select in Windows.

The OS keyboard language/layout should have no say in this.
The reason Ctrl+Alt acts as AltGr in the first place, is because Microsoft decided to use Ctrl+Alt as a "backup" if the keyboard doesn't have the AltGr key. But like 99% of keyboards do have it. (Even US keyboards have it, it just says Alt on it instead of AltGr, but it works the same.)

So... at most, a program could check whether the keyboard has the right Alt (AltGr) key or not, and then decide what to do. If it's missing, a shortcut-heavy program would prioritize shortcut (Ctrl+Alt) functionality, whereas perhaps a typing program would prioritize special character entry and convert Ctrl+Alt to AltGr.
But in cases where the AltGr key exists (99% of the time), we should just have both and treat these modifiers differently.
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Old 02-04-2022, 06:26 PM   #6
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key
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Old 02-05-2022, 11:23 AM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by inoto View Post
How are you testing it? Because to test this properly you need to use a key that is used both for a program shortcut and for a special character.
Try to map some function in NP++ to Ctrl+Alt+E (since AltGr+E is used for €).
Then press Ctrl+Alt+E and AltGr+E and see if there's a difference.
In my case there is, regardless of what keyboard language/layout I select in Windows.
Holy cow! It indeed does distinguish between Ctr+Alt+E and AltGr+E. The latter writes €, the former runs the assigned action.

And so does TextPad.

Yeah, it would be great if Reaper did this too. One extra key combination to work with.
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Old 02-05-2022, 11:28 AM   #8
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This gets increasingly complicated... that Wikipedia page claims that "Windows interprets Ctrl+Alt as AltGr", linking to this page https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldne...29-00/?p=40003.
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Old 02-06-2022, 08:40 AM   #9
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Well, Windows interprets Ctrl+Alt as AltGr *by default*, I guess. But, as we can see in Reaper, that behavior is not guaranteed. Programs are free to do things differently.
And that MS blog post is from 2004, so things might have changed since then. But sure, not using Ctrl+Alt shortcuts at all is one way to avoid these conflicts.

Fun fact: LibreOffice has the opposite problem of Reaper. Character input has priority over Ctrl+Alt shortcuts there. So if you have a key that's used for both, you won't be able to use the shortcut. For example, Ctrl+Alt+E is a shortcut in Calc, but it doesn't work with most European layouts, which use AltGr+E to type the € symbol.
Here too, this could be avoided by treating these modifiers differently and letting users use both, like in Notepad++. But I'm repeating myself already...
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Old 02-06-2022, 09:28 AM   #10
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I get a rough idea, why AltGr in Reaper is a bigger problem that I thought.

AltGr has some issues with ReaScript as well(maybe other areas too?) where Justin really struggled multiple times to get this 100% right. Some weird edge-case somehow remained always.

Now I get why. It looks like a coder's nightmare...

Edit:
One problem I see though: if this would be "fixed", this could actually break things.
For instance, all shortcuts, who are stored with Alt+Ctrl and are expected to work with AltGr, wouldn't work anymore as expected. Which could lead to a lot of frustrated users, having to reassign all their "AltGr"-shortcuts using AltGr this time.
Or the devs would treat them the same, which is like the current behavior, as it looks like.

Just pure speculation on my side...
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Old 02-06-2022, 02:06 PM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Meo-Ada Mespotine View Post
One problem I see though: if this would be "fixed", this could actually break things.
For instance, all shortcuts, who are stored with Alt+Ctrl and are expected to work with AltGr, wouldn't work anymore as expected. Which could lead to a lot of frustrated users, having to reassign all their "AltGr"-shortcuts using AltGr this time.
Yes, that's a possibility.
But I expect the number of users who currently use AltGr for shortcuts to be extremely small, because AltGr is not typically used for that.
Anyway, there could be a setting that lets users decide which behavior they want. And since it doesn't affect many people either way, it doesn't have to be in the main GUI; having it in reaper.ini would be fine.
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Old 03-23-2022, 01:23 AM   #12
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II thought that Alt-Gr was the key ( hit whem Reaper just would not behave.....
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