Freron MailMate

As a German software developer, I have a need to both type the German umlaut characters and ß (äöüßÄÖÜ), and also the programming characters square brackets, curly braces and backslash ([]{}\) that are hard to reach with a German keyboard layout. So I'm using a modified version of the US International PC input source. The problem I'm describing here also happens with US International PC.

The input source mostly uses the US keyboard layout, but it allows me to use character combinations for the special characters: double quote followed by a gives me ä, double quote followed by A gives me Ä, and double quote followed by space gives me double quote (").

For a long long time, this has been working well on MailMate. But sometime in the last couple of months, an update broke this. The breakage is very curious. Namely, after having entered an email address into a line, to the right of that email address the combinations don't work anymore.

For example, I create a new email message, and into the blank body field I type the following keys:

" a SPC f o o @ b a r . d e SPC " a

I expect the following result:

ä foo@bar.de ä

But I observe the following result:

ä foo@bar.de "a

So the combination of double quote and a after the email address was not combined into ä.

My workaround is to hit Return to enter a newline, then continue my sentence there, then delete the newline afterwards.

I also noticed that something similar happens with the option-U combination in the normal US input method: I can type option-u, then a, and this will result in ä. But not after an email address.

Correction:

It turns out that the presence of an email address on the line makes the umlaut composition fail everywhere on the line, not just to the right of the email address: After typing "ä foo@bar.de", if I then go to the beginning of the line and type double quote followed by a, then it also fails to combine. Same with option-u followed by a.

I'd like to point out that it's not a general Mac problem: For example, I'm typing this bug report into a text area field in Safari, and I don't have this problem here. Both double quote followed by a and option-u followed by a combine nicely anywhere on a line, even if there is an email address on the line.

Can you reproduce this problem?