Cannot type symbols on dead keys (e.g., to write ', ", or ^)

Using MATLAB R2022b Update 5 on Fedora Linux 37, but also confirmed not working on Ubuntu 22.04. I cannot write symbols that are on "dead keys", such as ', ", or ^. Normally, I would press the key and then space and the character appears, but now, only a space is inserted. It does work when switching to a keyboard layout that does not contain such dead keys (e.g., US International). Is this a bug or a problem on my side? I could not find anything about this issue.

[Antonio Sala]

Well, with 2023a it seems to be a bug, it happened to me in three machines, both in Ubuntu 22.04 and 22.10.

I asked a question to support and they told me it was upstreamed to developer team. However, they could not ensure which priority this was going to have...

I don't have that buggy behaviour in 2022b update 3.

[Andreas]

Yep, the problem came into existence with update 5 I think.

[Antonio Sala]

Still present in 2023b in Ubuntu 22.04.

[Franklin Ronald]

Same issue in R2023B running at AlmaLinux 9. But, it's not a "linux" issue, It's obvious that it's a Matlab issue.

Answer 1

[Tommi Heikkilä]

I had the same issue with MATLAB R2023a, Finnish keyboard and Ubuntu 22.04. The workaround for the issue was the same as here: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1911860

In Ubuntu settings I set the keyboard to 'Finnish (classic, no dead keys)' instead of 'Finnish' and now the keys work fine in Matlab.

Of course the behaviour is also slightly different: the symbols '¨ ^ ~' are typed straight away instead of being able to write accented characters but to me it's no big deal.

[Andreas]

That's also the solution I used (select a keyboard layout without dead keys). Still, it'd be nice if this were fixed.

[Tommi Heikkilä]

Yes, there is definitely something wrong with how Matlab or Ubuntu currently treats the dead keys because they used to work just fine. I just wanted to offer a workaround / bandaid solution because it is a super annoying problem.

Answer 2

[Cris LaPierre]

If those keys are only not working in MATLAB, please report this as a bug to customer support: https://www.mathworks.com/support/contact_us.html

[julien javaloyes]

Here is one workaround.

Either write in a terminal 'setxkbmap -variant nodeadkeys' before running matlab

or put in our startup.m system('setxkbmap -variant nodeadkeys');

both seems to work on manjaro 23.0.0

[Simon Beyer]

still not working for me

[Antonio Sala]

I spoke to customer support when that happened to me at 2023a launch... They replied they moved the issue "upstream"... but, well, the bug is still there in 2023b, I just installed it but, sadly, cannot type accents in my MLX files for my students, nor 2^2...

I don't know if 2023b would have any workaround, but I didn't find any for 2023a. "No dead keys" keyboard setup means "useless in a language where 30% of words have accents".

[Andreas]

@Antonio Sala Thanks for your reply, shame to hear the issue hasn't been resolved yet on R2023b. Perhaps as a temporary workaround, you could use a different editor to write the text and copy-paste that into the mlx file.

[Edilberto]

I have the same problem with Ubuntu 22.04 and Matlab 2022b, 2023a, 2023b.

[Antonio Sala]

This bug seems to have been resolved in 24a prerelease... Well it's still unreleased/beta so who knows if fixing something else will break that again but, for the moment being, there is hope in the horizon.