Ctrl+Shift+F not working in PuTTY when using a modified keyboard layout on Win 7

Question

Since deadkeys are horribly annoying (German keyboard layout --> `, ^ and ´ are deadkeys) I've decided to use Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to create a custom keyboard layout to get rid of those deadkeys (as suggested in How to make ^ and ` non-dead-keys on Windows 7 with German keyboard layout).

This worked fine, however, as soon as I load a custom keyboard layout - even if it's completely unmodified (i.e. without the deadkey changes) - I cannot use CTRL+SHIFT+F (same for other keys, but F is the key where I had the problem first) anymore in the PuTTY terminal.

read shows me ^F when the original keyboard layout is enabled; when switching to a custom layout it does not receive anything when pressing CTRL+SHIFT+F - when just using CTRL+F it works fine though.

Answer 1

PuTTY doesn't do anything special with such combinations, so it's down to the Windows keyboard layouts. Ctrl+letter combinations are handled specially by keyboard layouts though, automatically generating control characters unless something else has been assigned, which is why Keyboard Layout Creator doesn't display those control characters.

It seems to be hardwired into the layouts whether Ctrl+Shift+letter behaves the same as Ctrl+letter, so for example it is the case for the standard "United Kingdom" layout, but not for "United Kingdom Extended". Furthermore, it would appear that MSKLC creates the latter variety only.

Have you tried assigning the control characters to the Ctrl+Shift combinations yourself? And why not just use the combinations without the Shift?

There's more on this at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/11/04/9037027.aspx, although nothing about the Ctrl vs Ctrl+Shift difference in particular.