ZSA keyboard symbol layer rollover from shifted to unshifted symbol shifts both

[lnrssll]

Requirements

• I've searched platform-specific issues, issues and discussions to see if this has been reported before.
• My issue is unrelated to multiple key presses, OR it is and I've confirmed it is not key ghosting.

Describe the bug

When I roll over <= (I am still holding < when I begin pressing =) in the symbol layer of my ZSA Moonlander on MacOS, I get <+ only when kanata is running. I have process_unmapped_keys set to no, and I don't actually have mapping for any of the relevant keys.

I tried this with a minimal config that just swaps f and z. I know this isn't a keyboard hardware issue because this only occurs on MacOS. I recognize that not using Mac would be a valid solution then, but I'm forced to for work, and I love using kanata, so I figured I'd check.

I know that the way my keyboard sends shifted symbols like < to the machine over usb is as a shift and a comma, so I suspect that the shift is being applied to both characters. To check this, I've tried typing the left chevron then releasing then the equals sign as rapidly as I could, and it doesn't yield the same issue. It is only if I roll into the equals sign (I am still holding the first key when I press the second)

What is confusing to me is that this works perfectly fine on MacOS when kanata is off, so my hypothesis is that (only on mac?) kanata assumes that holding < and pressing = at the same time means you must be holding shift too.

Thank you!

Relevant kanata config

(defcfg
process-unmapped-keys no
)

(defsrc
f z
)

(deflayer default
z f
)

To Reproduce

1. Requires a ZSA keyboard sorry. I have a symbol layer where < and = are under the (physical) s and d keys.
2. while using a held modifer layer shift (in oryx/QMK) roll over the two keys

Expected behavior

That if I have process unmapped keys as turned off then all unmapped keys should have identical behavior to my operating system.

Kanata version

1.7.0-next

Debug logs

No response

Operating system

MacOS

Additional context

It may be confusing why I'm using a programmable keyboard and kanata. I use it to map my function keys to OS-specific commands, like copy and paste, so that I can use the same keyboard when I switch to my linux machine. When the keyboard isn't connecting, I lrnx into a kanata config that has the same layers as my Moonlander.

[lnrssll]

Update: On both operating systems (with kanata off), I've found that If I rapidly activate the layer mod key (layer mod on my Moonlander, not kanata) and then do the roll, I can get a <+, but if there's a pause between activating the layer and performing the roll, it's impossible (for me). So it looks like kanata may just (on MacOS) have some difference in sensitivity of some sort? To be clear, it is possible to get the issue with any speed when kanata is on, like a layer activation then a very slow roll with any key press overlap.

If you have any ideas, please let me know! My current thought is to actually use kanata to solve the issue by replacing the = in my moonlander config with a function key and letting kanata turn it into a =...

[lnrssll]

Update: Leaving the issue in case it's useful to know about this particular case, but the fn key solution works great for me. Now I replace all the unshifted symbol keys in my moonlander config with f13-f24 and then map them in kanata. It doesn't fix the super fast layer activation thing (weird), but it's good enough for me.

[jtroo]

There might be additional latency in macOS that make the issue easy to reproduce.

[szageda]

I'm using Linux, and KMonad, interestingly, produces the same behavior—I had discovered it before I found this discussion (I'm currently in the process of porting my layouts and layers from KMonad to Kanata). I've yet to port my Symbols layer to Kanata to test if the same behavior also happens with Kanata+Linux.

I'll report back here with the results once I've finished my Kanata configuration.

Anyway, here's my KMonad config: https://github.com/szageda/keeb-utils/blob/main/Linux/KMonad/keeb-utils.kbd

---

Specs:

• KMonad version: 0.4.3, commit a6ca5cad4cb03463eba653b7f455c119f767bbe3
• OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12.10 (bookworm)
• Kernel: Debian 6.1.129-1 (2025-03-06) x86_64 GNU/Linux (Linux 6.1.0-32-amd64)
• udev version: 252.36-1~deb12u1