Comment by mdaniel
Comment by mdaniel 3 days ago
I have to be very disciplined about switching my layout back to US English before launching games because they seem insistent on using the mapping for WASD versus the keys for WASD. But, worse (IMHO): some games use the keys and thus I can't predict whether the game was coded correctly or not and thus I just gave up and made it part of my launch process
I have secret desires to convert one of my old MacBook Pro devices into a Steam-via-Proton setup to get out from under the tyranny of Windows but since gaming is designed to be a break from "work" ... that's why it's not already done
Your computer doesn't actually know what the keys for WASD are. It just receives a number (commonly called scan code) for the pressed key from the keyboard, and has to use the mapping to determine which key that actually was.
There's some convention for which scan code to use for which physical position on a keyboard, but that's not correlated with what's actually printed on the key caps. E.g. on common QWERTY keyboards the "A" key will have scan code 4, but on AZERTY keyboards it will have scan code 20.
Games can probably get away by listening for the scan codes of the keys in the position commonly used by WASD, but it's a bit fragile, and they can't actually tell you what's printed on the keys they're listening to. The lack of consistenency is certainly annoying, though...