Eclipse key mappings confused

Question

I'm trying to use eclipse on Win 7, but for some reason it is screwing up my keys.

For example, when I press '{' it ends up displaying a '^'. Im pretty sure that this is what would happen if I had a french keyboard layout, but I'm pretty sure that my language settings in Windows 7 are set to use Canadian English. Firefox or notepad don't have a problem, so I guess that means it's eclipse.

Any idea how to fix it? Right now I'm just copying and pasting symbols lol.

Answer 1

Windows XP has a feature that swaps keyboard layout if you hit a key combination (default is left alt + shift). Since it appears to remap on a per-application basis, you might think it is a problem with Eclipse since it won't appear to affect another application. This feature is especially a problem with Eclipse since some useful keybindings may use alt + shift + something and if you don't press the something part, your keyboard layout will switch.

To disable, open the Text Services and Input Languages dialog (easiest way is to right click on the task bar, choose Toolbars > Language bar then right click on the Language bar icon and select Settings...)

In the dialog, click on the Key Settings button. In the Advanced Key Settings, select Switch between input languages and click Change Key Sequence... Deselect the Switch input languages and Switch keyboard layouts checkboxes then hit OK.

While you're in the Advanced Key Settings dialog, if you have any of the language specific hotkeys set, you may want to disable those as well. Just select Switch to (language) and then repeat deselecting the Enable key sequence checkbox and hit OK.

By the way, if you don't want to disable this and your keyboard gets remapped to a foreign language layout, just toggle it back by pressing Alt+Shift (or whatever the combo is).