Beta5 - Key mapping issues

I see some changes in the key mapping with beta5. I lost the ability to enter a backslah ' \ ' with beta5. I have a MacBook Pro and also an Apple external usb keyboard (the current white model).

My keyboard and mapping in Mac OS X and also in the XP-SP2 guest is : Belgian-French (that is quite the french (France) one but with some slight changes (though I never remember exactly which).

I'm attaching a keyboard map view as displayed by Mac OS X so you can see what it physically looks like.



The upper left key (@) is dead in XP guest. Pressing it does'nt work.
The bottom left key (<) gives a small 2 or 3 when pressed in XP guest. This is what the upper left key would have done on a real Windows belgian keyboard.

With beta4 I could generate a backslash by pressing ctrl-alt-` (the key on the right, which is in orange colour on the jpg). With beta5 I can't anymore. It gives a ` dead-key. Which I agree is more correct regarding the belgian keyboard.

The whole issue revolves around the upper-left and bottom-left keys which are reversed and one of them not functional. On the XP keyboard, the < and > characters should be on the bottom-left key (instead of small 2 and small 3). I don't care wether the upper-left key works or not. It should produce small 2 and small 3 but this is nearly *never* ever used. The backslash should come out of AltGr (ctrl-alt when in the guest) along with the bottom-left < > key.

Wow, reading my above text, I'm not sure it will make sense to you without having those keyboards under the eyes, but there clearly is a reversal between upper-left and bottom-left keys. I suppose the < > and \ would have been generated by the upperleft key (due to the flip-flop between those), but unfortunately that key doesn't generate anything in the guest os.

Programming without < > and \ is hard... Yeah, alt-92 and the like work in between, but that is not so fun.

Apart for these points, it looks to me that the mapping is right. If right means that the mapping must correspond to the places where the keys are located on a PC keyboard. A pair of { and } is typed by pressing the keys AltGr-ç and AltGr-à like on a PC keyboard while on the Mac they are typed by pressing alt-( and alt-). I don't know if having the keyboard act and map like a PC keyboard is the right thing to do, but at least it is useable, if it is complete.

An alternative (how bad or good I'm not sure) would be to have the keyboard map in the guest OS like on the host OS. I would type alt-( and alt-) for { and } and I would type shift-alt-: for the backslash.