Thanks for digging up the details. I found a recent bug report on SDL's Bugzilla that is related to this issue: https://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3188 The bug report has not been aknowledged yet (update: there are now some comments on the report). I've seen a workaround in the yquake2 project: https://github.com/yquake2/yquake2/blob/AZERTY-workaround/src/backends/sdl/input.c#L393