Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 270 posts

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#151

Post by MauranKilom »

MattKimber wrote: post #18
alfonsodev wrote: post #9

> So you are typing "Don't" and the ResetCursorPosition() function gets called and you look at the textbox and now it says "on'tD" I had this bug trying to implement a text editor using Draft.js but not sure it was for the same reason. I guess tumblr devs tried to implement a text editor and at the same time have some vim like shortcuts(jkl). This makes you appreciate how less can be more.

Javascript editors trying to reinvent desktop paradigms but without the 40-odd years of practice and having all the events arrive whenever they feel like is one of the most frequent irritations of web-based platforms for me, because you use a text editor so frequently and therefore encounter its problems similarly often. For example, earlier today I was editing a small internal app in Retool. I typed something, insti…

MS Teams is just as terrible.

If I accidentally fat-fingered e.g. the \ key at the end of a message ("Got it!\"), I want to

1. press the up key

2. press backspace

3. press enter

to delete the last character in the last sent message.

But unless you actually wait at least a second after step 1, the UI is so sluggish in starting the edit of your last message that you instead get "please type a message to continue" because you pressed enter while the New Message text box still had focus.

Things are much worse if you want to do anything more complex. Say, capitalize the first letter of the last sent message (up, home, delete, type capital letter, enter). Usually results in complete gibberish, like appending the capital letter to the message, or sending it in a new message (depending on how fast you are).

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#153

Post by haddr »

haddr wrote: post #152

Another weird thing: some programs like to capture key combinations that are used to input some diacritics. It is exceptionally bad when it’s a mouse driver, and even worse when it happens on your company laptop where you have no admin rights to remove it…

One more funny story: we used to have some weird errors from time to time, when someone accidentally committed code with some letter L placed randomly in the code. We soon happened that it was a result of people blocking windows machine (win L), when somehow the letter L got propagated to the IDE running under Linux in VirtualBox. Yeah, we used Linux on top of Windows machines back then…

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#154

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

t-writescode wrote: post #147
dbatten wrote: post #33

True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p. I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account... Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter…

At a job I worked at, we had servers that were given several internal IP addresses to map to external IP addresses. One day, one machine just ... stopped having a bunch of those IP addresses. They were just gone. We didn't understand, troubleshot as much as we could, and eventually just gave up and went "forget it, just try restarting the machine." It worked. It's amazing what weird states a computer can get into tha…

Bit flips from cosmic rays happen all the time. It's inevitable that they sometimes change state in deleterious ways.

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#155

Post by ljm »

miah_ wrote: post #73
atribecalledqst wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had happened.

On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).

Same deal if you remap the key in Windows using the PowerToys utility. Only, it'll happen whenever something pegs the CPU.

Never had the problem when using SharpKeys to rewrite the registry.

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#156

Post by handsarebags »

Feel for op ;D

Appreciate the description “fractally broken“. oh dear :)

Has a similar predicament[1] (though completely different cause); felt very uncivilised copy and pasting the character I wanted from the internet…

Still wondering what the most elegant way I could have gotten that character, especially if I didn’t have internet access.

Scroll through random files?

Perhaps I might’ve known a little about ASCII and tried converting a few numbers to characters till I found the character I wanted.

At the time I did not, and was thankful the internet provided the character I needed.

Still feel like I got away with something and would have been stumped without that… :)

[1] http://www.bagsend.net/posts/best_problem.html

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#157

Post by ljm »

Steltek wrote: post #30
smcl wrote: post #22

These hotkeys in websites are an utter curse. So many times I've started typing in Jira, then something weird happened that caused my keystrokes to be interpreted by the page instead of entered into a comment box ... then the ticket gets reopened, unassigned, etc.

(I feel like we jumped topics from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895 ) JIRA's Search is far worse than the regular JIRA hotkeys. The Enter key will incorrectly tab-complete JQL just before executing the search. Meanwhile, the Tab key doesn't tab-complete and instead focuses the Search button (which lets you execute the uncorrupted JQL). You have to actively train yourself out of how everything else works…

Gitlab is another culprit for this and their UI/UX is growing to be as awful as every other complex enterprise tool on the market.

The search/filter box on the MR and Issues list has the appearance of accepting free input, but what you need to do is use some ridiculous no-code query UI to click your way to a valid query.

I can't type 'author: xxx' into the field, because that will tell me that searching that way is unsupported (so why let me do it?). Instead, I have to start typing, select the word 'author', then another box will appear and I have to select '=' in it, and then a third box will materialise where I can search for a username. At this stage, it's basically a coin toss as to whether you get the desired input or the whole form breaks and you have to start again. Someone, somewhere, thought this was more intuitive than parsing a string or offering some predefined filters.

My only question is: why?

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#158

Post by _moof »

JimDabell wrote: post #81
account42 wrote: post #74

> the same site that then fixed that bug and forced all blog descriptions to be utf-8, but then implemented size limits as a number of bytes. > so they truncated mid-utf-8 character, which made parsing the XML A REAL FUN TASK LET ME TELL YOU How is this a problem unless you do UTF-8 validation when parsing the XML, in which case stop doing that for data you don't control.

If you truncate a UTF-8 string mid-character, then can’t that sequence swallow the next byte, such as <, which would break XML parsing completely?

UTF-8 encoding works like so:

  0xxxxxxx
  110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
  1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
  11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
...where the "x" bits encode the code point. So if you're halfway through a four-byte sequence and see a byte like 0xxxxxxx, you know something's wrong.

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#159

Post by axiosgunnar »

miah_ wrote: post #73
atribecalledqst wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had happened.

On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).

Perhaps hold shift to temporarily deactivate it then?

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#160

Post by numpad0 »

Kuraj wrote: post #49

I don't know how many Polish people who owned a Radeon card in the 2000s are there on HN but I'm sure they can all relate :-) as the card software would overwrite the key combination used to type the letter "ć" and open the Catalyst Control Center instead. Argh!

Sometimes I wonder if there will come a day when everyone just switch to IME based inputs for all semantic text entries. "anthropomorphillistic" is "anth[tab][tab][tab]", "Здравствуйте" is "zdravstvuyte[space]", "豚骨醤油" is "tonkotsusshouyu[space]" and so on. In IME off state input reverts to US.

It might lead to a dystopia where typing o-r-a-n-g-e somehow yields "a bright spectrum at dusk" but that's an issue for a separate discussion.

Post reply on HN