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Comment by tomatsu | Hacker News Reader

Each time there's an Atom release announcement, I check if they've finally fixed AltGr.

They didn't. Most non-US keyboard layouts are still broken.

This! I don't even know how can they name something a text editor in which you CANNOT TYPE letters you know, the most important feature of a text editor to allow typing and Atom can't do that.

This, and the inability to open large text files. You would think a priority for a text editor would be to be able to actually open text files and write correctly on them.

If V8 can't handle it, there is no way Atom will handle it. Some would assess this as major software design issue (yeah I mean me).

Why can't V8 handle it? Too many pointers on the heap?

V8 has some limits on memory allocation. I don't know why. I guess the engine allocators are not optimized to handle very large allocations.

VS Code (which is also built on top of Electron) can handle large files just fine.

AltGr works fine for me on Linux, and has since the first time I tried Atom ages ago.

They? Atom is a collaborative effort, you can fix that yourself.

While open-source is nice, if an editor doesn't support my keyboard I would just pick a different editor instead of patching core functionality in. It's not like there's a shortage of editors that let you use non-US keyboards.

> you can fix that yourself

I can't and neither can you.

You can't go back in time and tell them that they shouldn't use Alt+Ctrl for any of the built-in shortcuts.

You also can't get rid of those shortcuts.

You also can't finalize that UI Events spec and just land those features in Chromium.

They could have gotten rid of those shortcuts, but they decided against it.

Anyhow, Chrome 51+ (current stable is 52) does support the required part of the spec now.

https://jsfiddle.net/1zhcpj8a/

I do get:

  Alt AltLeft
  AltGraph AltRight

Which means you can now easily and accurately tell if AltGr was pressed. This release of Atom could have fixed it.

"Can" implies both ability (e.g. Javascript programming) and time to delve into the internals to find the issue, go through the procedure of submitting a patch etc, which is not a given the parent has, whether Atom is "collaborative" or not.

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