Hacker News Reader

Comment by CWIZO | Hacker News Reader

Gah. People please stop using Z as the default key for down (or whatever). If you can't detect my keyboard layout use keys that are the same on every keyboard, no matter the language, or provide an option to configure the keys. My Z (on a Slovenian keyboard) is where your Y is (on your English keyboard). This makes the game unplayable for me, since my "down" key is above my "up" key, which makes it almost impossible to play. /rant over

Awesome demo tho. Would love to see source of the flash part (maybe I missed it) so we could compare the source, not just performance (which seems to be about the same on my 5 year old laptop).

edit: who's now working on a (HTML5|Flash) vs Silverlight demo? That would be even more awesome.

View on HN

You have asked an important question: how do you detect the keyboard layout (in Javascript) when using KeyUp/KeyDown events? A regular press event will provide the charCode but the press/release versions do not.

You could ask if the user wants to use the standard, or custom and then capture the keycodes for up/down etc.

Quite interesting. I suppose you could ask the user to press "z" and see which KeyUp event fires.

Would love to hear a more elegant solution.

There are no keys that will work for everyone. I use Colemak -- the A and Z keys are in the same spot as Qwerty, but K is where N is on Qwerty, so that's a difference. Throw in Dvorak, and you only have A and M in the same place on those three.

A "right" answer is to make the keys remappable.

Arrow keys work for (almost) everyone.

I find arrow keys quite inconvenient on my happy hacking pro keyboard, which I would imagine to be a popular choice around here.

On my french keyboard, both sides are equally handicapped, because the M too isn't on the same line as on a US keyboard : utterly unplayable :)

I always install a us keyboard configuration as well in addition to my french keyboard for those kinds of issues. There is no need for two keyboard. Then you can just switch by pressing ctrl-shift simultaneously on windows.

Or just buy a US layout keyboard and use that! It's much better for coding anyway (especially for ObjC and its square brackts - these things aren't even labled on most international keyboards). Also it allows for much faster zergling production!

I quite like my Slovenian keyboard thank you very much. I have all the stuff I need to program (PHP mostly, so C would be cool to), and I have used English keyboards and didn't like them.

I'm sorry if I'm rude, but there are other characters than a-z (which I need to input quite frequently). And that is a concept English speaking developers seem rather hard to grasp (judging by most of the software out there). I just wanted to point that out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com