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> What baffles me is that the problem exists in apps used by millions of people every day, developed by gigantic corporations who pride themselves with having t

> What baffles me is that the problem exists in apps used by millions of people every day, developed by gigantic corporations who pride themselves with having the best engineers in the world. Why is this baffling? Because the underlying technical issues are rather trivial! > Hint for developers: Switch your computer’s keyboard layout to something other than US to debug your application’s shortcut handling on different layouts. The problem with this and all the other X is broken and should be tested articles is that the testing burden is already enormous. Plenty of companies don’t even test with Firefox and/or Safari. That’s really the problem that needs to be solved. How to reduce the testing burden.

tkainrad 6y ago
I agree to some extent. However, I have outlined a few very simple approaches. At the very least, developers could stop using special characters for their most important shortcut bindings.
smnrchrds 6y ago
For a 10-person startup, that's fair. For a company like Google , with offices in Germany and France and hundreds of engineers from any nationality, not so much. Other companies fall somewhere in between based on their headcount and global reach.
- jameshart 6y ago
  Big companies aren’t huge for the sake of being huge. They employ so many people because they have so much work to do. They still employ as few people as they can get away with.
  - spicybright 6y ago
    Plus it's all about profit margins. Investing in tons of testing for not enough return from users means they just won't do that. I'd imagine you'd need multi-lingual testers to use the product too, not just a native speaker given a foreign keyboard. There's no way to find bugs an average user would face with normal use.
layer8 6y ago
If there was a standard way to define hotkey bindings, a simple linter could take care of that. It just shows how far we still have to go in terms of good UI creation tooling.
- jakear 6y ago
  This is part of why I’d like to see more VSCode-as-an-OS (disclaimer work on VSCode)... imagine writing only the code to go from bytes on disk => view and back, and getting for free: version control, command palette, keybindings, Windows/Mac/Linux/Web support, file explorer, tabs, split views, hot exit, etc etc etc.
  - salamandersauce 6y ago
    We already have a perfectly good OS that does all that. It's called Emacs.
- kevincox 6y ago
  This is the real solution. Providing a native API with i18n built in would quickly start resolving this issue. It reminds me of developers who want to capture link clicks for internal navigation but acccidently block right or middle click as well because it is the easy thing to do. If we provide APIs that make the right thing the easiest we will have more websites that do the right thing.
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
I don't think testing with a non-US region settings and a non-English language is a huge burden. As a regular user of “internationalised” software, it's really obvious when the people who wrote it do not speak more than one language, or only considered a single-country perspective. Monolinguals, especially those living in the United States, are a minority globally. If you're going to develop all software in the United States, please at least make it work for the rest of us.

tkainrad 6y ago

I agree to some extent. However, I have outlined a few very simple approaches. At the very least, developers could stop using special characters for their most important shortcut bindings.

smnrchrds 6y ago

For a 10-person startup, that's fair. For a company like Google , with offices in Germany and France and hundreds of engineers from any nationality, not so much. Other companies fall somewhere in between based on their headcount and global reach.

jameshart 6y ago
Big companies aren’t huge for the sake of being huge. They employ so many people because they have so much work to do. They still employ as few people as they can get away with.
- spicybright 6y ago
  Plus it's all about profit margins. Investing in tons of testing for not enough return from users means they just won't do that. I'd imagine you'd need multi-lingual testers to use the product too, not just a native speaker given a foreign keyboard. There's no way to find bugs an average user would face with normal use.

layer8 6y ago

If there was a standard way to define hotkey bindings, a simple linter could take care of that. It just shows how far we still have to go in terms of good UI creation tooling.

jakear 6y ago
This is part of why I’d like to see more VSCode-as-an-OS (disclaimer work on VSCode)... imagine writing only the code to go from bytes on disk => view and back, and getting for free: version control, command palette, keybindings, Windows/Mac/Linux/Web support, file explorer, tabs, split views, hot exit, etc etc etc.
- salamandersauce 6y ago
  We already have a perfectly good OS that does all that. It's called Emacs.
kevincox 6y ago
This is the real solution. Providing a native API with i18n built in would quickly start resolving this issue. It reminds me of developers who want to capture link clicks for internal navigation but acccidently block right or middle click as well because it is the easy thing to do. If we provide APIs that make the right thing the easiest we will have more websites that do the right thing.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

I don't think testing with a non-US region settings and a non-English language is a huge burden. As a regular user of “internationalised” software, it's really obvious when the people who wrote it do not speak more than one language, or only considered a single-country perspective. Monolinguals, especially those living in the United States, are a minority globally. If you're going to develop all software in the United States, please at least make it work for the rest of us.