Why does my typing come out wrong in a VM console?

Consoles such as noVNC, iDRAC, iLO and VMware Remote Console forward key positions rather than characters. The guest then reads those positions with its own keyboard layout, so pressing the key labelled W on a QWERTY board produces a Z on a Belgian AZERTY guest.

How do I type a backslash on a Belgian AZERTY remote session?

On Belgian AZERTY the backslash is AltGr plus the key between the left Shift and the W. A 104 key ANSI keyboard has no key in that position, so it cannot be pressed at all. Use Alt plus 92 on the numeric keypad, paste through the console clipboard, or change the guest layout.

Is Belgian AZERTY the same as French AZERTY?

No. The letters match but the punctuation and the AltGr layer differ, so a mapping built for one comes out wrong on the other. Belgian puts the braces on 9 and 0 while French puts them on 4 and the plus key.

Is any text sent to a server?

No. The layout tables and the conversion run in the page itself. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged.

Keyshift

Remote consoles forward the position you pressed, not the character you meant. A guest set to Belgian AZERTY reads those positions with its own layout, so hello world lands as hello zorld and a backslash never arrives at all. Keyshift does the position round trip for you, in both directions.

⇄ Translate

What should appear on the remote machine

What you type on your own keyboard

Try:

⚠ What to watch for

⌥ Keystroke by keystroke

#	Wanted	Press on your keyboard	Note

⎔ The two keyboards

same positions, different legends

Keys used by your current text are lit on both boards. They are the same physical keys, which is the whole trick. A greyed key does not exist on that keyboard at all.

Remote:

Yours:

x Shiftx plainx AltGr

? Why this happens

Characters versus positions

A normal clipboard paste moves characters and is safe. A console that emulates hardware moves scancodes. Proxmox noVNC, iDRAC, iLO, VMware Remote Console and most KVM over IP devices fall in the second group, which is why the same paste works in one window and fails in another.

The unreachable backslash

Belgian AZERTY hides the backslash behind AltGr on the extra key next to the left Shift. That key only exists on 105 key ISO boards. From a 104 key ANSI keyboard there is no position to press, so no amount of remapping helps. Keyshift marks these in red rather than pretending.

Dead keys bite twice

US International turns the apostrophe, quote, backtick, tilde and caret into dead keys, and Belgian does the same for the caret, diaeresis and tilde. They print nothing until the next keystroke, then quietly accent it. Press Space after one to get the bare character.

The real fix

Setting the guest layout to match your own keyboard solves this permanently: localectl set-keymap us on systemd, setxkbmap us for a session, or the region panel on Windows. Keyshift is for the machines you cannot change, or cannot log in to yet because the password has a backslash in it.