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Comment by adamzochowski | Hacker News Reader

There is also a whole slew of issues with Polish characters. Polish keyboard setup relies on "right-alt" and a letter to get it's diacritics variation. Ie: 'ą' is 'right-alt'+a

Windows for backwards compatibility reports 'right-alt' as 'alt+control'.

Many applications developers assign key combos with no negative checks. So 'ctrl-s', typically used for save gets triggered when user wants to type 'ś'. To repeat, "right-alt"+"s" is reported as "alt"+"control"+"s", which triggers crappy "control"+"s" checks.

Similar scenarios happen many places that check for 'alt'+'letter' without checking if control also is not pressed.

Microsoft thread for team user voice issues on this https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

or Medium's developer talking about 'ś' and 'ctrl'+'s'. https://medium.engineering/the-curious-case-of-disappearing-...

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ah, the Polish Alt-Right is a problem?

They have too much Control

> Windows for backwards compatibility reports 'right-alt' as 'alt+control'.

Interesting because on French AZERTY we also have an "altgr" key, and while Windows considers alt-control equivalent (ie. you cant type alt-control-à as well as altgr-à to get an @), typing altgr itself never triggers ctrl or alt shortcuts, it only goes the other way.

Same with an Irish layout (which is QWERTY): AltGr+(aeiou) gets you áéíóú, but never triggers Ctrl+Alt.

This is actually fascinating to me. I’ve dealt with keyboard input numerous times (not WinForms or browser either) and I always devised a way where control characters were a bitwise with the keycode. You would have to include this in any input mapping. I can totally see where this key combo issue would be a problem in a UI scenario in the browser or other shortcut-laden desktop app.

I remember ATI Catalyst Control Center (GPU settings panel) infamously binding Alt+Ctrl+C systemwide to launch itself.

So when you wanted to type 'ć' in any program in Windows, it would not work, and launch CCC instead.

Luckily the shortcuts were user-modifiable. So first thing to do on Windows after installing GPU drivers was to disable this hotkey.

Seems easy to fix

> Windows for backwards compatibility reports 'right-alt' as 'alt+control'.

There’s your problem, right there

No, there are at least two problems here.

An application shouldn't accept ctrl+alt+n as either ctrl+n or alt+n. That is simply a bug, no way around it.

It's hardly a bug, just a bad interaction.

I would argue that the bug is implicitly pressing Control. Control is not a layer modifier.

The backwards compatibility is for physical keyboards. So that a keyboard with just one alt can still trigger polish letters.

I don't know how other OSes allow for users to trigger "right-alt" when the keyboard has only one alt character.

As a Polish Linux user I think I'd switch between mappings in this case. One for typing źdźbłos and żółws, another to interact with shortcut-heavy apps.

I actually do this on two-alt keyboards too, because I like to use either alt for shortcuts.

That also works the other way around -- you can use alt+control instead of right alt.

This may make sense to do with some of the more annoying key combinations, e.g. the German layout requires pressing AltGr+7 for '{'. Both keys individually are usually pressed by the right hand, but pressing the combination with the right hand alone is a very uncomfortable hand position.

The same applies for a bunch of other languages with a character that's "s" with diacritic modifier, and ctrl-s as save isn't as bad - the most horrible case of this that I had was an old version of outlook webmail that I had to use for one client rarely, where ctrl-s was bound to 'send'. With no option to re-bind or disable it. So about half of the time when I'd get to writing an email it got sent in the middle of the sentence right before where a letter ś would be... And since I had to use it rarely, I never got used to it enough to switch keybord layouts.

Yeah, I use EurKEY which gives me Ctrl+Alt+s for ß and has a lot of other Ctrl+Alt special characters but is otherwise a US Layout.

But I must say that most tools on Windows seem to handle it well with AltGr, only Ctrl+Alt is problematic.

Really shows how useful macs having 4 modifier keys (versus PC’s 3) is. Also the better (though not perfect) matching of scopes and modkeys: on macs, command / control / option tend to affect different system areas entirely (with command taking precedence, then control, although control and option are rarely used together).

I do like Cmd+c vs Ctrl+c on a mac. On linux I've changed my terminal to use Ctrl+Shift+c instead of Ctrl+c for ^C because I kept accidentally killing programs when trying to copy text with Ctrl+c which works in every app except terminals...

I configured my terminal to copy on mouse release. This allowed to keep Ctrl-C for killing processes while I use Ctrl-V to paste with Ctrl—Shift-V configured to send the original Ctrl-V.

> I do like Cmd+c vs Ctrl+c on a mac.

It goes way beyond that though: if command’s in a shortcut it pretty much guarantees that’s an application / system shortcut, which frees Ctrl to only deal with text control (and literal control codes in the shell).

And thus Option essentially only does alternate characters.

It’s not perfect, mind, for instance the number of keychords means emacs is annoying whether you leave meta on option or move it to command.

I recently discover that if you remap Ctrl+C to Copy in a Linux terminal, you still get ^C when nothing is selected. It has made the experience so much better.

I personally find the Mac's use of command keys to be horrendous.

Taking a screenshot? Thats the claw handed Cmd+Shift+4 or maybe even Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+4. Why!? Triggering the emoji picker? Cmd+Ctrl+Space. Don't accidentally press Cmd+Option+Space or you get the world's most useless Finder window.

To make this worse, Apple sell a bunch of keyboards without the symbols printed on them. So often you have software telling you to press the ⌥, ^ and ⇧ keys when your keyboard doesn't even have labels for those symbols.

In contrast, Windows has the Windows key for interfacing with the OS and the Ctrl key for interfacing with apps. So much more logical.

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