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

The curious case of disappearing Polish S

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–118 of 118 posts

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#111

Post by zokier »

jdmichal wrote: post #104
zokier wrote: post #95

While most commentary is (fairly) focused on browser behavior and keyboard hijacking, I'd point out another viewpoint: why the frak does every latin alphabet using nation need its own keyboard layout? Couple of diacritics is hardly a good reason to reshuffle the whole keyboard.

Because typewriters, and therefore keyboard layouts, predate computers. There's no technical reason to not just have composable meta-keys, excepting maybe the pure number of existent diacritics [0]. In fact, on the German keyboard, the circumflex (ˆ), acute accent (´), and grave accent (`) keys all compose with the next entered character. (That is, á is entered by pressing ´, then pressing a.) Windows also offers an…

> Because typewriters, and therefore keyboard layouts, predate computers

Even early US computers (and typewriters before them) had relatively varied keyboard layouts, but somehow[1] they still managed to converge into the standard 104 key layout that we have today in the early 90s (and that is a quarter of century ago). What we have missed is the extension of that convergence into international community.

> There's no technical reason to not just have composable meta-keys, excepting maybe the pure number of existent diacritics [0].

> In fact, on the German keyboard, the circumflex (ˆ), acute accent (´), and grave accent (`) keys all compose with the next entered character. (That is, á is entered by pressing ´, then pressing a.)

Dead keys are fairly good solution. Indeed I counted 19 dead-key diacritics on my countrys official standard keyboard (which almost nobody uses).

[1] IBM PC/Wintel monopoly probably helped

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#112

Post by darklajid »

zokier wrote: post #95

While most commentary is (fairly) focused on browser behavior and keyboard hijacking, I'd point out another viewpoint: why the frak does every latin alphabet using nation need its own keyboard layout? Couple of diacritics is hardly a good reason to reshuffle the whole keyboard.

Especially the French one!

(I'm half joking, half serious - I grew up with a qwertz DE nodeadkey layout which certainly doesn't look sane from the outside either and exclusively use the US one now)

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#113

Post by stephenboyd »

lmm wrote: post #34
acqq wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour! 1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when w…

I've lost too much data to trust to autosave. When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time (I write Scala, I don't have the RAM to do that) - I want it to wait for an explicit Ctrl-S to tell it that I've finished a meaningful section and it should compile now. I have exactly the same thing on prose.io (which I write on a lot, and which looks very similar to…

When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time

Can you explain this? Is it common to use an IDE that autocompiles every time it autosaves?

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#114

Post by 59nadir »

The much bigger problem is that browsers out there are crap and won't let you re-map your keys as you want them.

How is it that we're well into the 2010's and I still can't get (my own) emacs keybindings in Firefox/Chrome without some silly extension that doesn't work 100%?

I can download uzbl, dwb or any other browser like it and edit my keys as I see fit, for emacs/vim keybinding behavior, without limits.

I don't know about Medium, but I also find that most websites have these hidden shortcuts and you can't even re-map those. Why is there no choice in all this? Browser developers and websites can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on UX/UI research, but can't figure out that I might want to re-map some keybindings.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#115

Post by qewrffewqwfqew »

mikeash wrote: post #101
qewrffewqwfqew wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be so dismissive if the overridden key were Ctrl-W?

What's the relevance of that question? There's no reason it has to be all or nothing. I would harshly criticize any site that overrode ctrl-W but I couldn't care less if they override ctrl-S.

The problem is that the decision is left up to the website.

But I see I'm in the minority here, thinking software should be predictable and leave the user a sense of control, so feel free to disregard my opinion.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#116

Post by lmm »

stephenboyd wrote: post #113
lmm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost too much data to trust to autosave. When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time (I write Scala, I don't have the RAM to do that) - I want it to wait for an explicit Ctrl-S to tell it that I've finished a meaningful section and it should compile now. I have exactly the same thing on prose.io (which I write on a lot, and which looks very similar to…

When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time Can you explain this? Is it common to use an IDE that autocompiles every time it autosaves?

It's the way I'm used to working, I can't say how common it is. Put it this way: I want to control when it compiles, and I want it to be very obvious if the error markers aren't up to date. So the setup I currently have is eclipse with automatic compilation but manual saving; the possible states are saved and up to date, unsaved (obvious from stars in the title bar) or still compiling just after a save (obvious from progress in the status bar). When I tried to use IntelliJ with its autosaving I found I was pushing code to master that didn't even compile, because I would make a change and then not realize that this had broken something.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#117

Post by mikeash »

qewrffewqwfqew wrote: post #115
mikeash wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the relevance of that question? There's no reason it has to be all or nothing. I would harshly criticize any site that overrode ctrl-W but I couldn't care less if they override ctrl-S.

The problem is that the decision is left up to the website. But I see I'm in the minority here, thinking software should be predictable and leave the user a sense of control, so feel free to disregard my opinion.

I'd be all for browsers blocking the ability of web sites to intercept or repurpose ctrl-W, personally. But I think repurposing ctrl-S is often a good idea.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#118

Post by qewrffewqwfqew »

mikeash wrote: post #117
qewrffewqwfqew wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the decision is left up to the website. But I see I'm in the minority here, thinking software should be predictable and leave the user a sense of control, so feel free to disregard my opinion.

I'd be all for browsers blocking the ability of web sites to intercept or repurpose ctrl-W, personally. But I think repurposing ctrl-S is often a good idea.

One might have thought the OP highlighted the inherent problems in making assumptions about the meaning of meta-keys for all of your users, all around the world.

But of course the OP continued to make the same mistake, which I pointed out way up at the beginning of this branch.

Post reply on HN