the corner office

Something technical for a change. For months this year, I had a weird problem in Eclipse where I'd be typing away, and suddenly my keyboard would start working like it was a US keyboard, instead of the normal UK keyboard that's actually plugged into the box. I'd mutter something unkind about Eclipse, restart the IDE and the problem would go away. I presumed it was some bug in Eclipse itself.

I eventually got annoyed enough by this semi-regular problem that I did a search to see whether it was fixable. It turned out not to be Eclipse's fault at all. When I travelled to Romania earlier this year I was still working on my PC back in London, and had to enable US keyboard support because that's what they use in Romania. Problem is, Windows uses Alt-Shift as a default shortcut to switch between keyboard types, and it goes without saying that Alt-Shift is two thirds of a great many shortcuts in Eclipse. The keyboard shortcut applies only to the application you're currently using, so it looked like it was 'fixed' each time I restarted Eclipse.

To properly resolve the problem you can either just hit Alt-Shift to toggle back, or change the shortcut keys in the Regional Settings control panel (iirc that's where it is), or as I did, disable all keyboard layouts except for the one I use daily.