The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)(aresluna.org)
247 points by colinprince 1 day ago | 100 comments
tl;dr: Medium users typing in Polish couldn't enter the letter Ś because the editor blocked Ctrl+S to prevent the browser's save dialog. The bug arose because Polish keyboards use Right Alt+S to type Ś, and Windows internally maps Right Alt to Ctrl+Alt—so the editor's Ctrl+S handler was swallowing the keystroke. The fix was a one-line change: only block Ctrl+S when Alt isn't also pressed.
HN Discussion:
  • Similar Ctrl/Alt shortcut bugs plague many other apps blocking Polish diacritics
  • ~Browsers should expose better APIs for key combinations and the fix is incomplete
  • Medium should autosave instead of relying on Ctrl+S shortcuts entirely
  • Tangential linguistic and cultural observations about Polish language
  • Technical Unicode trivia about Polish letter normalization quirks