8 ms·

Windows keeps automatically adding EN-US keyboard layout (2016)

64 points by punnerud 7y ago

yyyk 7y ago
I have had this problem as well. In my case, I correctly removed EN-US, but it turns out that most times when I connected via RDP Windows automatically readded the layout since it was available on the connected station. It's possible to a registry key to disable this behaviour: Goto HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout and add a new DWORD Key "IgnoreRemoteKeyboardLayout" with value "1". This solved the issue for me, Windows stopped adding EN-US.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  I would like to state that this behavior is completely and utterly insane. Who would want this?
  - yyyk 7y ago
    I'm no RDP expert at all, but I suspect it's a way of dealing with the RDP protocol. As far as I know, RDP doesn't send the letters to the server, but the keyboard event. So if both sides are using incompatible layouts, you could send "A" from your client but see a "B" on the RDP server. I switched en-US for another en layout so it's not a serious problem for me there, but on non-English languages it can be an issue when the other side doesn't match at all, and maybe it's a little easier when Windows installs the layout automatically for the user. This behaviour would be defencible if only Windows had informed the user, and allowed the remote desktop client to control it in advance...
    - tinus_hn 7y ago
      If you are sending keyboard events, but you really want the typed characters to match, the solution of course is to send the typed characters instead.
      - yyyk 7y ago
        That's the 99% right solution IMHO, the one that covers the main use case where the other side doesn't have your layout AND you are fine with your layout, you just want the other side to receive it correctly. There's also the case when the other side has a layout which you do want to use but do not have installed. I guess that's rather a rare case - if it's a desired layout, why wasn't it installed in the first place? Perhaps MS can't update RDP so trivially, and is stuck with the wrong architecture for a good while. But at least they could ask before adding a keyboard layout. Or allow enabling/disabling this as an option on the RDP client rather than a registry change.
  - iofiiiiiiiii 7y ago
    I want this. If I am connecting remotely, I want to use the keyboard layouts present on my remote station, since they are likely a good match for the physical keyboard I am actually sitting behind. Remember that keyboard layouts are not just different letters, they also define different sets of physical keys.
    - tinus_hn 7y ago
      So let the computer the keyboard is connected to do the translation. It already has the proper maps.
nosianu 7y ago
Note that the keyboard cannot be removed from the GUI - it does not show up. In the region and keyboard settings I mean, it shows up as configured keyboard though. What worked for me - and that was the only thing that worked - was to follow the registry-editing answer here (only the top part of the answer, not the update): https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-start/cant-remove-a-keyboard-layout-in-windows-10/058acf33-16d9-47f4-a24b-245b8823d90e https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10... I had to look through the entire registry for the key mentioned there though, I had to delete about 4 or 5 before the hidden US keyboard finally disappeared. Note that that thread is from 2015. Maybe US based Microsoft would find the issue more urgent if it was a different keyboard than a US one, so that they themselves notice it (I guess right now they would not?).
brighton36 7y ago
As a Dvorak user, ive had this problem (or similar ones) for years. I basically gave up typing in Dvorak on my windows machines (thankfully my primary desktop is Linux)
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Same, I had this from years. Strange to see it here.
- MiddleEndian 7y ago
  As a Dvorak user as well, I've found that as of Windows 10 (and perhaps 8 but I've not used that extensively), they've finally fixed their multiple layouts issue. You can disable the nonsense that is "different layouts for different windows" and get rid of the awful alt-shift abd ctrl-shift shortcuts and just switch layouts with win-space. I keep qwerty as a layout for when others need to use my laptop but the OS never unexpectedly switches me anymore. They finally caught up with classic MacOS lol
gizmoduck 7y ago
Title needs (2016), yeah?
- dang 7y ago
  Yeah. Added.
- NullPrefix 7y ago
  Still relevant in 2019, though.
lousken 7y ago
Yea, it's been pissing me off for a long time so I've ended up creating my custom keyboard layout so i don't have to switch between the two
yulaow 7y ago
I had this problems for years and I thought it was because of some to-me-unknown combination of keys I was pressing. I don't know now how to feel
- Doxin 7y ago
  Hitting ctrl-shift switches keyboard layout. It also happens to be by far the easiest shortcut in windows to hit accidentally.
beart 7y ago
I've always enjoyed that the most common response on just about any Windows support question is something along the lines of > If you would like too you can do system restore to restore some settings on your PC.
- rkachowski 7y ago
  It really frustrates me when I have a specific technical problem with windows (I only use it for gaming) and search results are full of psuedo mystical tech advice from community experts advising a system restore or changing registry values.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    It feels like most answers on this site come from robots or from moderators who barely know anything. I still have to see a good, on point, answer there from someone who really knows things.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      I have, but they never come from Microsoft employees. Story time: Let's say you administer an Exchange server and need to make a configuration change to a mailbox. Normally, the Information Store will cache mailbox state for up to 20 minutes and you'll have to wait for your change to take effect. But let's say you really really need that change to happen right fucking now, then what? Well, Microsoft support has your back: restart the Information Store service. While effective, this will also boot everyone's MAPI connections from the server and consequently pop up a giant scary warning dialog to all your Outlook users. Good job there guys. Fortunately, there are knowledgeable wizards casually dropping in to these support threads every once in a while who can give you a real solution. In this case, it's running `Update-StoreMailboxState -Database <dbname> -Identity <mailbox GUID>`. Yeah, Microsoft actually made a fucking powershell commandlet that does exactly the thing you need, but support has no idea it exists and just throws up their hands and tells you to interrupt the workflow of the entire organization and generate a bunch of calls to the help desk. If I ever meet the person who posted that answer, I owe them a few beers.
mxscho 7y ago
I had this problem as well. However, it only appeared when using the English language pack together with a German keyboard layout. When installing the German language pack parallel to the English one (and using the German keyboard layout from that language pack while still having the English language pack selected for language/region/date), the problem went away.
tiagobraw 7y ago
I also have this problem and to make thing worse my windows not cannot install upgrades anymore. There's one bad upgrade that fails to install and rollback just to try again in the next boot, entering a reboot loop. I had to disable upgrades and I don't really want to format my already configured OS soon.
manjana 7y ago
Omg, lol. I'm both humored and slightly annoyed by this. Why is this even enabled as a default.
johnchristopher 7y ago
Yup. It's like wasd and qwerty. I gave up using the french layout and my own binding (vbn + right click to move) because I got so tired to fight the machine's default. I am quite happy about the layout though :).
dooglius 7y ago
As a programmer dvorak [0] user, I find that I regularly have to get an admin to reinstall after a windows update. When all your coders only use en-us and you don't do solid internationalization testing, this is what happens. [0] https://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/ https://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/
- rlkf 7y ago
  If this happens often enough to be a nuisance, you could try to install it as a preload substitute for an official layout (for instance en-US), or have the admin guys put the Registry settings in an AD group policy.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dang 7y ago
This is a follow-up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20306886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20306886, which links to https://yngve.vivaldi.net/2019/06/20/microsoft-keep-your-hands-off-my-keyboard/ https://yngve.vivaldi.net/2019/06/20/microsoft-keep-your-han..., which unearthed the OP.
- punnerud 7y ago
  I posted both, hoping to get someone at Microsoft’s attention. I live with this problem every day at work.
  - Const-me 7y ago
    Windows can syncronize settings across devices. Physically, the settings come from from MS cloud servers. Are you using a local user account, or widnows live account? Another source of such issues is settings for default user account. There's a GUI deep inside control panel to copy profile settings to both default accounts: https://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/26/windows-10/copy-current-language-region-settings-new-user-accounts-windows-10.html https://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/26/windows-10/copy-current... Try to configure these languages, and copy to both. Also, if you're on a corporate network, it can be a group policy, or some other enterprise feature. When a PC joined a domain, domain admins can change all settings from the central location.
inlined 7y ago
Working in Windows I found that there are two magic localizations: non localized is a default failsafe that is a copy of EN-US. The other fun one is “pseudo-loc” which is used in testing; it replaces letters with similar ones that have accents or diacritics to detect hard coded English strings. I wonder if the EN-US keyboard is actually a fall-through to the non-localized version when the localized keyboard fails to load.
Joeri 7y ago
Windows syncs keyboard layouts automatically between installations linked to the same microsoft account. Why anyone would ever want this behavior is beyond me, but this sounds like the cause of this issue. https://superuser.com/questions/961467/how-to-stop-windows-10-from-syncing-keyboard-layouts https://superuser.com/questions/961467/how-to-stop-windows-1...
AlexCoventry 7y ago
In fairness, this happens to me in ubuntu from time to time, too. Never been able to figure out why, but it happens so rarely that I've never really tried.

64 points by punnerud 7y ago

yyyk 7y ago

I have had this problem as well. In my case, I correctly removed EN-US, but it turns out that most times when I connected via RDP Windows automatically readded the layout since it was available on the connected station. It's possible to a registry key to disable this behaviour: Goto HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout and add a new DWORD Key "IgnoreRemoteKeyboardLayout" with value "1". This solved the issue for me, Windows stopped adding EN-US.

tinus_hn 7y ago
I would like to state that this behavior is completely and utterly insane. Who would want this?
- yyyk 7y ago
  I'm no RDP expert at all, but I suspect it's a way of dealing with the RDP protocol. As far as I know, RDP doesn't send the letters to the server, but the keyboard event. So if both sides are using incompatible layouts, you could send "A" from your client but see a "B" on the RDP server. I switched en-US for another en layout so it's not a serious problem for me there, but on non-English languages it can be an issue when the other side doesn't match at all, and maybe it's a little easier when Windows installs the layout automatically for the user. This behaviour would be defencible if only Windows had informed the user, and allowed the remote desktop client to control it in advance...
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    If you are sending keyboard events, but you really want the typed characters to match, the solution of course is to send the typed characters instead.
    - yyyk 7y ago
      That's the 99% right solution IMHO, the one that covers the main use case where the other side doesn't have your layout AND you are fine with your layout, you just want the other side to receive it correctly. There's also the case when the other side has a layout which you do want to use but do not have installed. I guess that's rather a rare case - if it's a desired layout, why wasn't it installed in the first place? Perhaps MS can't update RDP so trivially, and is stuck with the wrong architecture for a good while. But at least they could ask before adding a keyboard layout. Or allow enabling/disabling this as an option on the RDP client rather than a registry change.
- iofiiiiiiiii 7y ago
  I want this. If I am connecting remotely, I want to use the keyboard layouts present on my remote station, since they are likely a good match for the physical keyboard I am actually sitting behind. Remember that keyboard layouts are not just different letters, they also define different sets of physical keys.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    So let the computer the keyboard is connected to do the translation. It already has the proper maps.

nosianu 7y ago

Note that the keyboard cannot be removed from the GUI - it does not show up. In the region and keyboard settings I mean, it shows up as configured keyboard though. What worked for me - and that was the only thing that worked - was to follow the registry-editing answer here (only the top part of the answer, not the update): https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-start/cant-remove-a-keyboard-layout-in-windows-10/058acf33-16d9-47f4-a24b-245b8823d90e https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10... I had to look through the entire registry for the key mentioned there though, I had to delete about 4 or 5 before the hidden US keyboard finally disappeared. Note that that thread is from 2015. Maybe US based Microsoft would find the issue more urgent if it was a different keyboard than a US one, so that they themselves notice it (I guess right now they would not?).

brighton36 7y ago

As a Dvorak user, ive had this problem (or similar ones) for years. I basically gave up typing in Dvorak on my windows machines (thankfully my primary desktop is Linux)

ubercow13 7y ago
Same, I had this from years. Strange to see it here.
MiddleEndian 7y ago
As a Dvorak user as well, I've found that as of Windows 10 (and perhaps 8 but I've not used that extensively), they've finally fixed their multiple layouts issue. You can disable the nonsense that is "different layouts for different windows" and get rid of the awful alt-shift abd ctrl-shift shortcuts and just switch layouts with win-space. I keep qwerty as a layout for when others need to use my laptop but the OS never unexpectedly switches me anymore. They finally caught up with classic MacOS lol

gizmoduck 7y ago

Title needs (2016), yeah?

dang 7y ago
Yeah. Added.
NullPrefix 7y ago
Still relevant in 2019, though.

lousken 7y ago

Yea, it's been pissing me off for a long time so I've ended up creating my custom keyboard layout so i don't have to switch between the two

yulaow 7y ago

I had this problems for years and I thought it was because of some to-me-unknown combination of keys I was pressing. I don't know now how to feel

Doxin 7y ago
Hitting ctrl-shift switches keyboard layout. It also happens to be by far the easiest shortcut in windows to hit accidentally.

beart 7y ago

I've always enjoyed that the most common response on just about any Windows support question is something along the lines of > If you would like too you can do system restore to restore some settings on your PC.

rkachowski 7y ago
It really frustrates me when I have a specific technical problem with windows (I only use it for gaming) and search results are full of psuedo mystical tech advice from community experts advising a system restore or changing registry values.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  It feels like most answers on this site come from robots or from moderators who barely know anything. I still have to see a good, on point, answer there from someone who really knows things.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    I have, but they never come from Microsoft employees. Story time: Let's say you administer an Exchange server and need to make a configuration change to a mailbox. Normally, the Information Store will cache mailbox state for up to 20 minutes and you'll have to wait for your change to take effect. But let's say you really really need that change to happen right fucking now, then what? Well, Microsoft support has your back: restart the Information Store service. While effective, this will also boot everyone's MAPI connections from the server and consequently pop up a giant scary warning dialog to all your Outlook users. Good job there guys. Fortunately, there are knowledgeable wizards casually dropping in to these support threads every once in a while who can give you a real solution. In this case, it's running `Update-StoreMailboxState -Database <dbname> -Identity <mailbox GUID>`. Yeah, Microsoft actually made a fucking powershell commandlet that does exactly the thing you need, but support has no idea it exists and just throws up their hands and tells you to interrupt the workflow of the entire organization and generate a bunch of calls to the help desk. If I ever meet the person who posted that answer, I owe them a few beers.

mxscho 7y ago

I had this problem as well. However, it only appeared when using the English language pack together with a German keyboard layout. When installing the German language pack parallel to the English one (and using the German keyboard layout from that language pack while still having the English language pack selected for language/region/date), the problem went away.

tiagobraw 7y ago

I also have this problem and to make thing worse my windows not cannot install upgrades anymore. There's one bad upgrade that fails to install and rollback just to try again in the next boot, entering a reboot loop. I had to disable upgrades and I don't really want to format my already configured OS soon.

manjana 7y ago

Omg, lol. I'm both humored and slightly annoyed by this. Why is this even enabled as a default.

johnchristopher 7y ago

Yup. It's like wasd and qwerty. I gave up using the french layout and my own binding (vbn + right click to move) because I got so tired to fight the machine's default. I am quite happy about the layout though :).

dooglius 7y ago

As a programmer dvorak [0] user, I find that I regularly have to get an admin to reinstall after a windows update. When all your coders only use en-us and you don't do solid internationalization testing, this is what happens. [0] https://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/ https://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/

rlkf 7y ago
If this happens often enough to be a nuisance, you could try to install it as a preload substitute for an official layout (for instance en-US), or have the admin guys put the Registry settings in an AD group policy.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dang 7y ago

This is a follow-up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20306886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20306886, which links to https://yngve.vivaldi.net/2019/06/20/microsoft-keep-your-hands-off-my-keyboard/ https://yngve.vivaldi.net/2019/06/20/microsoft-keep-your-han..., which unearthed the OP.

punnerud 7y ago
I posted both, hoping to get someone at Microsoft’s attention. I live with this problem every day at work.
- Const-me 7y ago
  Windows can syncronize settings across devices. Physically, the settings come from from MS cloud servers. Are you using a local user account, or widnows live account? Another source of such issues is settings for default user account. There's a GUI deep inside control panel to copy profile settings to both default accounts: https://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/26/windows-10/copy-current-language-region-settings-new-user-accounts-windows-10.html https://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/26/windows-10/copy-current... Try to configure these languages, and copy to both. Also, if you're on a corporate network, it can be a group policy, or some other enterprise feature. When a PC joined a domain, domain admins can change all settings from the central location.

inlined 7y ago

Working in Windows I found that there are two magic localizations: non localized is a default failsafe that is a copy of EN-US. The other fun one is “pseudo-loc” which is used in testing; it replaces letters with similar ones that have accents or diacritics to detect hard coded English strings. I wonder if the EN-US keyboard is actually a fall-through to the non-localized version when the localized keyboard fails to load.

Joeri 7y ago

Windows syncs keyboard layouts automatically between installations linked to the same microsoft account. Why anyone would ever want this behavior is beyond me, but this sounds like the cause of this issue. https://superuser.com/questions/961467/how-to-stop-windows-10-from-syncing-keyboard-layouts https://superuser.com/questions/961467/how-to-stop-windows-1...

AlexCoventry 7y ago

In fairness, this happens to me in ubuntu from time to time, too. Never been able to figure out why, but it happens so rarely that I've never really tried.