[eridius]

Slack migrating to Electron was by far the worst decision they’ve ever made for UX. That one migration introduced a ton of bugs and platform inconsistencies, most of which are still around.

One I just complained about the other day is Electron apparently doesn’t handle font fallback properly, so if I type an emoji that Slack doesn’t support, such as [frozen face], it just renders as a placeholder square in desktop Slack even though it renders as the emoji on both the website and in the iOS app.

Edit: Apparently HN strips the emoji from the comment [facepalm]

[laumars]

Slack doesn’t pick up my system dictionies correctly so I keep getting American English suggestions for words correctly spelt in GB English. It’s very annoying and I have no idea how to fix it.

Wouldn’t have this problem with a native app.

[Klonoar]

Having built this kind of thing natively, you actually might! macOS, for instance, has a few race conditions that can (easily) occur when using the built-in spell/grammar-checking functionality on text field/view instances.

...which is exactly the kind of thing that nobody wants to deal with when trying to ship a product. ;P

This myth that you get these things for free with native apps is just that: a myth.

[laumars]

> Having built this kind of thing natively

As have I :)

> you actually might! macOS, for instance, has a few race conditions that can (easily) occur when using the built-in spell/grammar-checking functionality on text field/view instances.

That forces it to load the wrong dictionary (one which differs from the system dic) and do so repeatedly each and every time you use the application? That doesn't sound much like a race condition to me...

> This myth that you get these things for free with native apps is just that: a myth.

Is that actually a myth though? Because I've never heard anyone suggest that - least of all uttered that nonsense myself.

[Klonoar]

I've had it load the wrong dictionary, surprisingly, yeah (I keep en-us and en-jp handy). It's a classic case of Apple abandoning macOS like they have for multiple releases now. ;P

There are bugs for NSSpellChecker going back as far as 2009 regarding automatic language detection (they're, however, now annoying as piss to link to... because all the old mailing lists/archives have been seemingly nuked. Thanks, Cocoa community!). This in turn hits Electron apps, since they're just passing back to the native API anyway.

https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-spellchecker/i...

[laumars]

Fair enough.

For reference I was referring to Linux where Chromium and my DE all have their dictionaries set up correctly. I only ever seem to have this problem with Electron apps too. It's very annoying though.