The toggle terminal key combination doesn’t work when input language isn’t English

[yakovmanshin]

The toggle terminal key combination (⌃ + `) doesn’t work when keyboard input is set to a language other than English. For example, the tilde / backtick key produces a < in the German layout, and pressing this key in combination with ⌃ does nothing.

Other key combinations I tested work regardless of the characters their keys produce: ⇧ + ⌘ + P with the Russian layout selected still opens the command palette, even though the P key is mapped to the Cyrillic letter З.

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes

• VS Code Version: 1.68.0
• OS Version: macOS 12.4

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Switch input to a language other than English;
2. Press ⌃ + `.

[yakovmanshin]

What’s even stranger, pressing the combination with the British - PC layout selected opens the terminal but doesn’t close it. The backtick key is mapped to \.

[Tyriar]

@alexdima any idea if this is a problem we can fix and if it would be an issue on my end or the keybindings system?

[alexdima]

By default, the toggle terminal keybinding is bound to ctrl + `. That means ctrl plus the key or key combination that produces `. On the US keyboard layout, ` is produced by the key to the left of 1. On other keyboard layouts, ` is produced by some other key combination.

@yakovmanshin What is the keyboard layout you are using?

[yakovmanshin]

Hi @alexdima! My computer has an English (US) keyboard, and most of the time, I switch between English and Russian.

The thing is, many keyboard layouts make it pretty hard to produce the backtick character. The Russian and Ukrainian, for example, don’t have the character printed on the physical keyboard, and to type it, you need to press ⌥ + ⇧ + 0—so to toggle the terminal, it’d take you four keys and two hands. Yet both layouts (just as nearly all non-Latin keyboards) are dual-localized with the Latin character set, where the backtick is either to the left of 1 or to the right of the left shift, and, important enough, it’s printed on the key.

So the situation where for the majority of commands it’s enough to look at the Latin letters on the keyboard, regardless of the actual characters those keys produce (⇧ + ⌘ + P being an example), but for some you need to know exactly how to type a certain character in current layout, is pretty confusing.

[alexdima]

Let's track in #141761 . This seems very similar. The Russian keyboard layout doesn't produce ` so we could consider adding a fallback also for ` besides . as mentioned in the linked issue.