Perfetto usability is low with an AZERTY keyboard

[aviv-nino]

Hello, thanks for this tool.

There's actually a few issues with AZERTY (french) keyboard, and I spotted some related issues / PR so I thought I could make the fix myself but the files changed and I don't know enough TS fuckery to be of any use. :(

Issues I spotted:
1/ In https://ui.perfetto.dev/, the "tooltip" which says "Use "W A S D" to navigate the trace." is incorrect (it should be Z Q S D).

2/ Much more annoying, using Q (me - azerty) / A (you - qwerty) to go to the left opens the "Current selection" tab, wasting 50% of the screenspace.

2025-11-25.16-32-05.mp4

[primiano]

The problem is not TS, is figuring out the right layering of IME, keycode etc to make sure everything makes sense.
While i acknowledge the problem, this is a bit small for us to bubble up in our priority list any time soon. it's the sort of thing where either we'd accept a contribution, or we'd keep open until the next FitIt (we tend to do them every now and then, see https://lalitm.com/fixits-are-good-for-the-soul/)

TBH this would be a good use of AI. if you spent enough time with the AI Agent of your choice, I'm sure that with some patience you could figure out a good solution (but please make sure everything seems to make sense in the code before blindly sending a PR)

if not, we just had a fixit, we might get to this in the next one

[stevegolton]

the "tooltip" which says "Use "W A S D" to navigate the trace

We do actually get this right in the help menu "Press ? / Click 'Keyboard shortcuts' in the sidebar)

I guess we missed it on the home page :/

You can see how it's done in the help menu here:

perfetto/ui/src/frontend/help_modal.ts

Line 91 in bb59a98

this.codeToKeycap(KeyMapping.KEY_ZOOM_IN),

2/ Much more annoying, using Q (me - azerty) / A (you - qwerty) to go to the left opens the "Current selection" tab

We actually have a special dvorak mode https://ui.perfetto.dev/#!/settings/dvorakMode that disables certain shortcuts that collide with the panning/zooming modes in that layout. It's a bit of a hack, but I guess we could do the same for azerty. Unfortunately it's a game of whackamole trying to keep the various shortcuts clear of the pan/zoom keys in various layouts.