I find it very hard to use the web based editor on my Macbook pro and finnish keyboard.

Especially {}[] characters are pain. If i press {, nothing happens. If I press paste, I get { along with the stuff that was in the clipboard.

Also If I import utf-8 encoded source files from local disk, the text becomes garbled and compiler complains about the encoding.

That is a very strange isssue. Is is because you are using the finnish keyboard setting in mac osx. You should try and switch to the default US keyboard set. You can even set it to show up in your status bar so its just one click away to switch.

my [] and {} work just fine in the web compiler.

Hi,

Interesting! I've never even seen a finnish keyboard, but Wikipedia tells me it is the same as the Swedish keyboard;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Swedish. Nice to know an mbed has made it to Finland; perhaps we should start a map of where they end up!

I've just chatted to luben who is working on the IDE. We've got some upgrades to the editor coming that will improve keyboard and UTF-8 support, so should fix this issue. Unfortunately they are still a while off and will come as part of a full editor upgrade, so won't fix your problem in the short term.

In the mean time I'd be interested if you have found a workaround? Vlad suggested switching the keyboard setup, so i'd be interested if that works?

Thanks,
Simon

Tried with US layout and it worked fine. Same problem exists with Chrome and Windows so its definitely a keyboard layout issue.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I have to use dead keys to get characters like []{}?

Hi Paeae Technologies,

We're testing keycode/language related bugs now, but don't have a finnish mac to test on (surprise!).

Can you confirm what key combinations you use on a finnish Mac to get {}[] - I assume there is no AltGr key (wikipedia suggests "[" would be AltGr + 8). Is it Ctrl-Shift-8 for example?

Any info would be useful.

Thanks,
Simon

Hi Simon,

On mac the combinations are:

[  alt-8

] alt-9

{ shift-alt-8

} shift-alt-9

you see a pattern here are ( and ) are shift-8 and shift-9. Same is true for characters / | and \ shift, alt, shift-alt.

On PC layouts these are different, the keyboard combinations for { [ ] }  \ are altgr-7, altgr-8, altgr-9 and altgr-0

Also i think you can use Keyboard Viewer (from keyboard system preferences) to view/use finnish keyboard onscreen.

cheers,

Mikko

Thank you! That helps a lot.

The same sort of problems occur with Ubuntu 10.10 and Firefox 3.6.12.

When I use the USA international keyboard, the following characters do not work in the mbed editor:

tilde, circonflex (above key 6), single quote, double quote and the backtick (upper left below tilde).

All these characters work normally in the inputbox for google for instance.

When I use the USA keyboard in the normal mode (no dead keys), everything works fine.

The advice is therefore  to use a keyboard in normal layout, without dead keys, in MBED.

Are there any updates on this? I still have issues with my Macbook and the Belgian keyboard. Even with a custom "Logitech Belgian" layout I still have issues. Most of the time it is impossible to input characters like [, ] and #. But when I have copy/pasted one in to the editor, it is possible for like a minute to input these characters.

Using the "US International" keyboard layout fixes these problems, but it is really annoying to type on that layout.