User:TJones (WMF)/Notes/Accents, Dead Keys, and Suggestions

This is another bit of discussion copied over from Phabricator (T75605) so I can easily find it later.

Xoristzatziki noted a problem with accented characters and the completion suggester:"A bug ... still exists for Greek terms (in ALL projects, even in en.wiktionary) . Typing in the search box anything that ends in accented letter does not provide any suggestions that include the last letter (even if they exist ex. καλά). Copying and pasting works. Also typing anything after (ex. a space) works. It seems (to user) like the search is not done by the really typed letters, and the code is 'waiting' for something."I'm pretty sure this is a Javascript issue.

For my quick test, I'm on a Mac, using the American, French, and Greek keyboards, and I tested in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. To my surprise, they all behave the same.

If you use dead keys (keys that put an accent or other diacritic on the next letter you type), the Javascript "keypress" event listener doesn't get the message that anything has happened. I tested this with both Latin and Greek letters on the Mac keyboards.

As I understand it, the Greek keyboard uses a dead key to add ´ and ¨ to vowels. Similarly in the Mac American keyboard has dead keys for several diacritics (I use ´ ¨ ˆ ` ˜ regularly). If I type resumé to search on English Wiktionary, I also don't get any more suggestions for the final é. (BTW, it happens for non-final letters, too, if you pause, but it's easy to miss if you keep typing).

On the French keyboard, é has its own key, and when I type resumé using that keyboard, it behaves as expected.

On the Mac Greek keyboard (so this probably does not apply to Windows or Linux), I can type ά by typing option+shift+α. If I type καλά this way it gets suggestions as expected. Similarly, you can use option+shift+ to type other accented vowels: 1/έ 2/ί 3/ή 4/ό 0/ύ ./ώ —I didn't see any precomposed versions with diaeresis (i.e, ϊ or ϋ ). These non-dead-key versions generate new suggestions.

So, the problem isn't accented characters per se, but rather characters that have to be typed with dead keys, at least on a Mac keyboard. I'm not familiar with the UI code that's handling all this, so I have no idea how easy it would be to fix, but searching online shows a lot of people complaining about this, but no obvious solutions.