Alt Key doesn't work

[paralax]

Hello Community

Since days, my Alt key doesn't work. I want to type special characters like curly bracket ({}) but it just doesn't work. Ifyou now ask your self how I did type the brackets above, I just used the "Character Viewer".
When I open the keyboard viewer and hold on "alt" key, I can see on keyboard viewer all special characters but when I press one it just don't shows.
I create a new fresh acount, there it works.
Any ideas where to look?

Thanks
patrick

[Giaguara]

What keyboard layout do you use?
And what keyboard combination did you use previously for getting those keys?
(I get {} with shift-[ and shift-] with the layout I use.. but those depend on the layout in use)

[paralax]

I am using the Swiss-German Keyboard. When I open the Keyboard Viewer and hold the alt key, the curly bracket character is on the numeric key "8" or "(". The key kombination should be alt+8 but it doesn't work, it shows nothing. That was working, I am sure.
I create a new User and there it works like it should.

[Giaguara]

So something for that user only...
So we should be looking at some keyboard related file at [your hard drive]/Users/[yourhomefolder]/Library/Preferences folder.
com.apple.KeyboardViewerServer.plist, anything else you see with com.apple.keyboard.[something].plist, and possibly com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist - drag those to your desktop (you can delete or replace them later), and after that, log off your user, and log back in and try to use the keyboard now. If it would still not work for those specific keys you could even drag everything from said preference folder (don't confuse with [hd]/Library/Preferences as that is totally different) and log off and in again, and then (now it should work) drag all the contents from old preferences back, not replacing any files that were modified since.

[paralax]

That worked. You are my savior! I am coding Java, this is no possible without special character! Thank you very much!