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The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

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Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#21

It's just like the new Copilot 365. Every time I try to type "Ć", Copilot pops up. I have to close the app constantly.

And every time you press it, an entire VM gets spun up, fully provisioned, and then set to LLM processing mode even though all you'll be doing is immediately closing the app again.

Thanks Microsoft, stellar!

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#22

This was a fun read. Here is the tl;dr version: > Instead of blindly and greedily blocking Ctrl S, we could block Ctrl S only if Alt key was not pressed. Ctrl alt s was the keyboard shortcut for the polish S. Ctrl s was blocked to improve saving. And this also blocked ctrl alt s too.

No, the shortcut was alt+s. That's what people typed. Then on Windows, which used alt-combinations already, it became rightalt+s (as the rightalt wasn't used by Windows itself) but instead of having a dedicated rightalt code, Windows would rewrite that key into a ctrl+alt code combination.

If you're going to tl;dr, at least get the most important detail right. People only ever pressed alt, and Windows went "and now you're pressing ctrl+alt", so that alt+s becomes ctrl+s with an alt that no one's looking for when it comes to intercepting and killing off key events.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#25
post #3
post #2

I believe the fact that Polish uses the Latin alphabet (with a small Slavic twist to express the extra sounds) meant it was much easier for Poland to align itself westward. I think the average Pole is much closer culturally to the Western neighbours than to a Ukrainian or Russian (maybe apart from cuisine).

Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine. (This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)

It's also true for Belarus, Baltics, and some parts of Ukraine. Generally, we can speak about North-Eastern European cuisine with potatoes, secale flour breads, and various pickled things. And that name will make a lot of everybody upset, cause everybody in those lands pretend they are "Central". Americans would not believe how many "geographical centers of Europe" are claimed there.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#26
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine. (This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)

How reasonably can German cuisine be described as a single unified thing? My mother was from East Prussia and my father from Swabia and their "home" cuisines were pretty dissimilar -- if for no other reason than climate.

Same is true for Croatia.. food from Slavonia (near Zagreb) is very different from the coastal regions (Istria and Dalmatia)

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#27
The real issue here is first that browsers don't expose a simple way to check for key combinations and second that developers don't bother building their own. You'll find on any number of sites that an intended key combination can also be invoked with additional modifiers of alt or shift or whatnot. Even here, the code shown only fixes the broader issue on windows; alt+cmd+s still gets blocked.

There should be a proposal for browsers to expose a property on the keydown/up/press event containing a code for the key combination. Something like "CTRL+S", "CTRL+ALT+S", etc. The programmer could then switch over this property rather than having to check key codes and modifiers manually.

I would also propose to any web developers that they build this property themselves in their own code and check against it instead of checking modifiers directly. Not only would it protect against bugs like in the OP, it would also be a lot more convenient to use.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#28
> Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian

This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#29

> Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.

>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.

your "adjustment" didn't propose what other Slavic language would outnumber Ukrainian to be 3rd behind Polish and Russian, so you didn't move the needle.

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