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Comment by tinus_hn | Hacker News Reader

I would like to state that this behavior is completely and utterly insane. Who would want this?

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...

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.

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.

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.

So let the computer the keyboard is connected to do the translation. It already has the proper maps.

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