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^{Originally posted by veryalien September 5, 2021}
There seems to be a problem that all the buttons under the feathering keyboard screen don't return anything when alt is pressed or NUMLOCK (alt+left-shift) is on.

I'm busily modifying pye_lcd and simpleTerminal to work as a self-contained editor with circuitpython on a keyboard featherwing. I noticed that I couldn't use alt to modify the up, down, left and right joystick buttons.

You can use CFG_REPORT_MODS to get reports of all the individual modifiers being pressed/released left-shift, right-shift, sym and alt.
You can press and hold a modifier for example left-shift and press L1, this returns the L1 code which means you can use the modifiers left-shift, right-shift and sym held down together with the buttons as different soft keys/buttons.

But you can't press for example alt and L1 and get a key returned. Also, when NUMLOCK is on, all those buttons go dead until you get out of NUMLOCK. Which is a little bit confusing, because you can't easily see why the buttons don't work any more.

As far as I can see the problem is in the firmware. I could be wrong but, without actually debugging the featherwing firmware, it looks like this to me. There are no symbol entries for the L1, L2, Joystick, R1 and R2 buttons in the table, only for the bbq10 keboard keys itself, this code from keyboard.c will incorrectly change chr to 0 if alt is pressed at the same time as a button:

		default:
		{
			if (reg_is_bit_set(REG_ID_CFG, CFG_USE_MODS)) {
				const bool shift = (self.mods[MOD_SHL] || self.mods[MOD_SHR]) | self.capslock;
				const bool alt = self.mods[MOD_ALT] | self.numlock;

				if (alt) {
					chr = p_entry->symb;
				} else if (!shift && (chr >= 'A' && chr <= 'Z')) {
					chr = (chr + ' ');
				}
			}

			break;
		}

I'm not sure if my logic is right, but something like that must be going wrong when alt and a button are pressed at the same time.
I really don't want to turn off CFG_USE_MODS and do all the keyboard modifier handling myself in my editor. I've used the left and right shift modifiers instead of alt. But,whatever the real problem is, it's still a little bit annoying,