Keyman keyboard not working in IrfanView and some other Windows applications

The Keyman keyboard layout I compiled and installed a few days ago does not work in :
a) IrfanView 4.70 64bit
b) MPC-BE 1.7.2
c) AIMP 5.30

It does work as expected in the following applications:
a) Windows Explorer (Windows file manager)
b) Windows Console (CMD) and Windows Terminal
c) Cygwin mintty terminal
d) vim (Cygwin vim in mintty, and Windows binary gvim)
e) Notepad
f) Microsoft Word
g) Brave and Firefox web browsers, including email clients like gmail)
e) BabelPad

In IrfanView, pressing any key a-z0-9, Space, or just Shift alone, throws out IrfanView from the Fullscreen view into the window view, instead of causing an expected behavior. In the window view, pressing any such key has no effect.

The only keys that work are the arrow keys, Backspace, Function keys, and Ctrl+letter/number combinations. They work as expected.

Pressing F2 in IrfanView opens up, as expected, a ‘rename the image’ dialog window and in that window the keyboard works: key stroke combinations emit correct Unicode characters. This is the only part of IrfanView where I observed the keyboard working.

In media player MPC-BE and in audio player AIMP there are very few a-z0-9 and SPACE keyboard shortcuts and the symptoms are the same as described above: pressing any of those keys has no effect.

These two applications use only very few such shortcuts thus the issue I am describing is not critical.

In IrfanView, however, inability to use a-z0-9, Space, Shift keys, to my great regret, renders the application useless.

Since this is an application my work heavily relies upon, I would like to ask anybody about your experience re. using Keyman keyboards with applications like IrfanView. Any information or assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Additional information:
the operating system: fully updated Windows 11 64 bit
Keyman Developer and Keyman — both 17.0.335

The keyboard layout was obtained by converting in Keyman Developer the .KLC source of my custom Windows keymap. With the original Windows keymap all applications work as expected.

Welcome to the community site @Marius,

Sorry to hear about this. What keyboard are you having this issue with?

I have tested the US Basic keyboard in IrfanView by writing some paragraphs using the text tool and it seems to work fine.

I realized that, although I could write the text, I couldn’t use some of the IrfanView hotkeys. The hotkeys only work when I use the Windows keyboard.

This appears to be a compatibility issue. You may need to disable the IrfanView hotkeys in order to write with the Keyman keyboard and switch back to the Windows keyboard when you need to use the hotkeys.

How does one deal with such ‘compatibility issues’?

The point is that I would like to be able to use the Keyman keyboard layout also in IrfanView, since this allows me to use full Unicode, not just Basic Plane, to rename and annotate images.

All crucial IrfanView functions for Full Screen viewing are available through a single press shortcuts like: Space, letters ‘a’ through ‘z’, digits ‘0’ through ‘9’. All such shortcuts are hardcoded, the user is not given means to change them. As I reported, none of those single key presses is understood by IrfanView when using the Keyman keyboard (which coincides in all of its basic unshifted states with the standard English layout).

Hello @Marius,
I have had a quick look. You can turn of the seralized input queue in Keyman and IrfanView shortcuts will work again. Here is how to do this Knowledge Base 97. You may experience some other keyboard issues with sequences of events occurring out of order.

We suspect it is due to the events IrfanView is listening to when determining if a key has been pressed.

Thank you for the suggestion. I did set engine.compatibility.serialize_input to 0. Then started Keyman. Unfortunately, the behavior in Irfanview persists: pressing any regular key immediately throws Irfanview from the Full Screen view to Window View and that’s it. I rebooted the computer, checked that the value of engine.compatibility.serialize_input is still 0, started Keyman, and opened a JPG file with IrfanView. No change. The same behavior.

Ok, I will dig a bit deeper to see what might be going on.