3.0.3 problem

[Dave Bennett]

File, Open does not show a list of keyboards, but rather a regular disk directory. There are no keyboard layouts under Keyboard Layouts directories other than the one I created from scratch a couple years back with Ukelele.

[Gé van Gasteren]

That’s correct!

You can’t open Apple’s keyboard layouts, they are not in XML. You can access them only through "New from current input source"

Other keyboard layouts that CAN be opened are in the folder coming with Ukelele, but they are relatively old.

On 11 May 2016 at 22:35, Dave Bennett <dbenn...@gmail.com> wrote:

File, Open does not show a list of keyboards, but rather a regular disk directory. There are no keyboard layouts under Keyboard Layouts directories other than the one I created from scratch a couple years back with Ukelele.

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[Dave Bennett]

I'll try that to make a modified keyboard, but another issue with this is that Ukelele is not showing me the older files I've created with Ukelele that are located in "user/xxx/Library/Keyboard Layouts" and there is no way to change to that directory once you have selected File,Open.

[John Brownie]

On 12/05/2016 7:23, Dave Bennett wrote:

I'll try that to make a modified keyboard, but another issue with this is that Ukelele is not showing me the older files I've created with Ukelele that are located in "user/xxx/Library/Keyboard Layouts" and there is no way to change to that directory once you have selected File,Open.

Well, there are many ways to get around this.

• Open a Finder window to the Keyboard Layouts folder, right-click on a file and open with Ukelele.
• When the open file dialog is open, type ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts, hit return, and you'll get there.
• From Finder, drag the file onto the Ukelele tile in the dock.
• Use Default Folder to customise your open dialogs.

There may well be other ways, but all of them suffer from the same problem. NEVER edit a keyboard layout that is in one of the Keyboard Layouts folders. Because any changes are automatically being saved, you run the risk of making your system unusable. The only way to do it safely is to open and then immediately create a duplicate, and save that to a different location.

John
--
John Brownie, john_b...@sil.org or j.br...@sil.org.pg
Summer Institute of Linguistics, Ukarumpa, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea
Mussau-Emira language, Mussau Island, New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea

[Gé van Gasteren]

John has good confidence that you will be able to exactly follow those last instructions.

But I would advise you to use the Finder and move any keyboard layouts you want to work on to a different place, that is: out of that Library/Keyboard Layouts folder.

I usually set up a "workbench" folder for such things, to keep different versions of the layout, icons, maybe a log, etc.
And I don’t work on the original file, but on a copy, so whenever things go wrong, I have a backup version.

Only after I’m done editing, I copy the new layout to the User Library/Keyboard Layouts folder, log out and back in as that user, then activate the layout in System Preferences.

Good luck!

[Dave Bennett]

Well, I'm not sure what I've done, but I did get a keyboard layout created and it appears to be in a separate file in my ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts directory. But who knows. This is has become a convoluted effort and the documentation hasn't kept up. Most confusing part was editing it. I'd open the layout directly in Ukelele, make the changes, Save it and then... nothing. Tried pushing it out to "this user" again. Nothing. Added it back in with Settings, nothing. Then I removed the original keyboard layout it was made from, from my list of keyboards with Settings, added the amended one back and it showed up changed. Somehow, having the original in affected the change in the edited one from taking place. Now if OS X would only go back to allowing me to set the keyboard by window... 

[Sorin Paliga]

Of course, NEVER work on original files, but on copies put somewhere on the disk, e.g. on the desktop in a folder labelled at choice.

[Sorin Paliga]

In order to identify possible problems, you must know where is the new keylayout, and where you put it BEFORE installing it, e.g. moving to /Library/Keyboard Layouts.

[Gé van Gasteren]

Dave, I guess you hadn’t changed the name of the new version of the keyboard layout. Then maybe OS X saw only one of the two files, not being able to distinguish them.

That’s one more good reason to move unused keyboard layouts out of the system folder before editing, and only have files in there you are actually using!

Your other wish:
OS X does allow having different keyboard layouts active in different programs, if that’s what you want to do.

(I always get confused, but it can be handy in some situations.)

Here’s some text from Mac Help (in El Capitan, but earlier versions have a similar thing):

Input Sources pane of Keyboard preferences

Check the box "Automatically switch to a document’s input source"

to:

Choose an input source for a document and have it used every time you work in the document until you close it, even if you switch to other documents that use other input sources in the meantime.

--

[Sorin Paliga]

On 12 May 2016, at 15:43, Gé van Gasteren <gevang...@gmail.com> wrote:

Your other wish:
OS X does allow having different keyboard layouts active in different programs, if that’s what you want to do.

(I always get confused, but it can be handy in some situations.)

Here’s some text from Mac Help (in El Capitan, but earlier versions have a similar thing):

Input Sources pane of Keyboard preferences

It is, indeed, very useful, when you prefer keylayout X in one app and another keylayout Y in another app. It is also annoying on other occasions, when you do not need this, but with a convenient setting to switch keylayouts, also selectable in Sys Prefs, this becomes an easy task. 

[Dave Bennett]

Well, it's good that this is working as I wished. (At one point it wasn't and I hadn't revisited in a couple OS X updates.) I like being able to have multiple Safari windows open with a different keyboard layout for each, depending on the language focus of each. Thanks for pointing out that this is back. Now if you could only get me to read the screen to see these kinds of things! 😃

[Dave Bennett]

Last time I used Ukelele I just opened the layout I wanted to edit, duplicated it, saved it under a new name and away I went. This time, none of that seemed to work as I expected. I have a file with the new name I gave it, but it shows up in a selection box by that name with the original keyboard layout name inside that. I select that and it shows me my altered version.

I am very confused by how I accomplished what I did with this version of Ukelele and what is actually happening on the system. I noticed that I have two files with the same name in my keyboard layouts directory, but only one has the icon of what I'm assuming is a system icon of "keyboard layout".

[Gé van Gasteren]

O, you forgot that there is a difference between the file name shown in the Finder and the name of the keyboard layout as shown when it’s in the keyboard menu.

That second name has to be set inside Ukelele before saving the keyboard: menu "Keyboard", option "Set Keyboard Name and Script".

Better don’t change keyboard layout file names in the Finder; it leads to problems and confusion.

It helps to read the manual or the tutorial... :-)

[Dave Bennett]

Well, the manual starts out incorrectly. File,Open does not display as shown in the manual. I get a regular file selection list of what's on the disk rather than a list of Keyboard layouts as in previous versions of Ukelele. That's where all the trouble began. Despite that, all seems to be working now.

One thing about setting the keyboard per window/etc. If I set the keyboard to dave0 for the first Safari window, then start a 2nd Safari window and set the keyboard to Spanish ISO, it "works". If I select back to the first Safari window, the keyboard changes back correctly. When I select the 2nd window, the keyboard layout doesn't change again. Also, if I'm on the 2nd window and have the keyboard set to Spanish ISO and open a new tab in that Safari window, the new tab defaults to the keyboard layout of the first window, not the on it's in. Kind of a mess there, but I suspect this is an Apple issue.

[Gé van Gasteren]

Yeah, the manual is not always right in the technical details, especially as it hasn’t always kept up with the progress of Ukelele itself.

Best read it for getting a general understanding of the necessary steps involved in creating/editing/installing a keyboard layout. Those haven’t changed! The specific menu commands, especially when used in different versions of OS X, can vary.
I liked the tutorial better than the manual, in fact—it gave me a better idea in a short time—but I haven’t checked/compared them recently.

Correct: the behavior with that feature of using different layouts in different programs—or even windows of one program—varies from one version of OS X to the next, so yes, it’s Apple business. Which version are you using?

Best practice is probably (at least for me) to keep the number of activated keyboard layouts small and assign a good shortcut to the command to switch layouts. Then you can quickly switch without accessing the menu...