Tell HN: Rant on macOS Sonoma's annoying typing innovations

They are not subtle, they actually get in the way.

For example when typing, if I want to add an emoji mid-sentence, I press the ctrl+cmd+space to trigger the character viewer, then I can start typing the emoji's name to put it. Now the behavior is that it scans my previous word, let's say it's a country name and then it suggests its flag emoji. The problem is that I can't override it without clicking a dropdown so that it opens the old dialog, and there is no option to get the old behavior back.

Same with the new Caps Lock indicator. I can see on the screen that I'm typing in all caps, there is a physical led indicator in the keyboard, so why that indicator onscreen then? And it's a floating popup, it shifts to where the typing cursor is positioned, using the tint color. Not subtle at all and it can't be disabled!

4 comments

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zshrc 2y ago ↗

If you don’t like it then turn it off.

mickelsen 2y ago ↗

I just said you can’t.

fuzzy76 2y ago ↗

The emoji suggestion mechanism seem to be made by someone that have no idea how real people actually use emojis. Emojis are never an illustration of the previous word.

However, instead of clicking the dropdown, you can press ctrl-cmd-space once more to skip to the full picker. However, it's buggy, and half of the time it won't output the emoji I pick there for some reason.

mickelsen 2y ago ↗

Ah, thanks for that. Yeah, the implementation was always iffy, while the search picks up many alternate names, sometimes it just doesn't show a 1-to-1 match. And well, they could have just implemented the suggestion as part of the full picker, as a first option row, while letting you search and pick the others.

As for the caps lock stuff, now that it's been more hours since the upgrade, it's definitely buggy: sometimes it pops up anywhere on web controls, very far away from where it's supposed to be.