Changing language to a non-latin language appears to disable keyboard shortcuts. I've dug around an saw this bug reported several times

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/...i?id=41169#c39
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1226962

its marked as resolved/Fix Released (atleast for libreoffice) but I still get this issue. and I also get this issue on Firefox,IceCat,mousepad,Thunar and many others) strangely it doesn't seem to effect all programs as atom seems to work fine.

another, possibly related, issue is that on some programs the change language shortcut doesn't work. For example when I am working on Thunar and I do the change language shortcut it appears as if it doesn't register it however, the second I focus on another tab which doesn't have this issue (like IceCat) then it switches the languages as if the command is queued and waiting for a window focus switch.

Running Debian buster (XFCE install, replaced with Awesome WM) tested with both Russian and Hebrew keyboard layouts

off the top of my head.
System keyboard is set to Hebrew.
Firefox is set to take latin (US_eng) for example.

so would this not automatically cause issues from the start?
The software is expecting the lang it was set to receive and the keyboard is set to give anything but that same lang.

Thereby causing a commination breakdown

(I do not play around with this, so I am just making a logical speculation).

I'm using Xfce and I've just tried my shortcuts with the Greek keyboard and they work perfectly, and so do things like Ctrl-x in LibreOffice. They should be responding to the key code but in your cases they are reading the character code.

The programs are obviously dependent on the window manager for their input, so I'd suspect Awesome. Try switching back to Xfce and see if that solves it. Personally, I'd never use a simple window manager for a multiple keyboard driver system: Icewm isn't up to it, for example.

I'm on xfce right now, tried libreffice and it still wont recognize shortcuts. same for IceCat, trying to do CTRL+A right now and it wont register unless I switch back to English.

How would I fix it then?

(I do not play around with this, so I am just making a logical speculation).

This is very strange! Try running the command-line tool xev, which reports the results of key presses. If I run xev and switch to Greek, then pressing the "a" key alone will show it as an alpha, but pressing it with Ctrl will show it as "a". What happes on your system?

when I installed Greek it did give me Greek_alpha for the a key a but turned it into simple a with the CTRL modifier.

but I dont speak Greek, I need Hebrew and xev gives me hebrew_shin, even with the CTRL modifier.

Well, that's interesting. Greek works and Hebrew doesn't. So, what about Russian? I suspect that will work, since it looks like the problem is in the code that handles complex fonts. The old bug reports show that there was a problem with GTK — one says that Russian was OK but not Hebrew — so it looks like the problem has come back. You might have to replace Buster's GTK version 3.24 with Stretch's 3.22.

yes. it worked. I made a mistake on my first test since the switching language doesn't work on some windows and appearently xev is one of them.

I downgraded to GTK 3.22 and the problem persists.

I've just installed a Hebrew keyboard driver and I have the same problem as in xev but not in LibreOffice. I'm sorry to say I give up! The only thing I can think of is that some programs are using GTK2 and some GTK3 and only one has the bug, but that's just a guess and not a solution.

1 members found this post helpful.

I decided to give up aswell. I switched to Mint today and both problems are gone. thanks for trying though