I’m having a problem where pressing the Delete (aka Backspace) key on a Mac deletes a group of characters. Generally, characters will be deleted until certain characters are encountered (e.g., a sigma which may require a substitution) or until the user presses a key.
All Macs are using sil_greek_polytonic keyboard with macOS 12 (12.5.1 and 12.6) and Keyman 15 (15.0.270 and older 15.0, which I updated to the latest before even reporting this). Some of them are M1 and some older Intel.
The problem only happens in certain applications, specifically Firefox (104 and 105) and some Chromium based browsers (Google’s Chrome and Respondus LockDown browser). I do NOT have this problem with Safari, Notepad, Apple Pages, Microsoft Outlook or Word or Edge (which is Chromium based), etc. but it does regularly happen on Firefox and Chrome. Nor do I see this problem on Windows versions of Firefox or Chrome.
Unfortunately, I must use Respondus LockDown browser for testing.
This doesn’t sound good. I will ask @Shawn, our Keyman for macOS developer lead, to dig into this further with you and try and track down why this is happening – and develop a fix. Shawn is however away all of next week, and will respond as soon as he is able.
Hi @DougR, thanks for the detailed description of the issue. I was able to see the same problem in Chrome, whereas Pages worked as expected.
For example, in Pages, when I type the letters ‘fws’ with the SIL Polytonic Greek keyboard selected, I see φως and pressing delete once results in φω.
If I type the same keys in Chrome, I see the same Greek letters, but the delete erases the entire word.
Secondly, in Chrome, if I type a word with a diacritic, it adds the diacritic to the previous letter but deletes all the letters before the preceding letter.
For example, in Pages, when I type ‘fws pe/tra’, I get φως πέτρα.
If I type the same in Chrome, the ‘/’ causes the letter π and everything preceding it to be deleted, so the resulting text is only έτρα.
Are you seeing the same behavior with the diacritics or any other unexpected behavior in addition to this?
I can’t say that I’ve noticed that diacritics were being missed—in my case, it would more likely be that I typed things wrong. I do notice that I can (sometimes) visually see when I type “e/” in some programs the ε appear, then disappear, then the έ appears. It may be that if I was typing faster that there would be an issue.
I have also tried Edge on Mac and while I thought it works better, backspace does tend to eat two or so characters (such as in a textarea). Again, Ctrl-H works fine. Safari also works fine, as mentioned earlier.
I have tried most of the software I use constantly (BBEdit, Messages, Notes, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) and some software I use infrequently (LibreOffice, Pages, TextEdit, etc.) just typing a few words and backspacing. It is only the browsers that seem to show significant issues. I did find one open source program that had issues, but they were different (Backspace would often fail to delete characters) and I’d guess gtk+ related.
I’ve created issue #7526 for this. We plan to address it in version 17.0 as it will require some significant changes to address it properly. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks again for reporting the issue.