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The Apple dictation and text editors bug

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The Apple dictation and text editors bug
Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Ever since I upgraded to OSX Mojave, a very strange thing would take place in VSCode, at first every now and again, and then more and more frequently. When I would type non-alpha characters, the wrong character would render. At first closing the window and re-opening via Terminal would take care of the issue. Then the other day I updated to OSX 10.14.5 from 10.14.4, and almost immediately, when I typed a non-alpha character, the wrong one rendered. When I closed out and re-opened the project, the bug no longer went away.

To make sure that it was not a VSCode only related issue, I opened the default Mac text editor TextEdit to see if the same would happen there. And it did! So it was not a VSCode issue as I initially thought, but a bug in the system.

I thought it over for a short while, and then inadvertently hovered over the language icon in my Macbook Pro's navigation menu. It was set to Croatian and NOT English. I hadn't TOUCHED OSX Dictation in like forever. How did it suddenly switch my language of choice on me? That would be the only way that this could happen. When using Dictation, you can choose from a large variety of languages, and then Dictation uses that alphabet when transcribing your voice dictation. This is the only way that I can access foreign alphabets via the keyboard, for lack of a better word. I have searched for software that will do it for me so that I don't have to dictate if I don't want, but had no luck. Those days are over! Thank God then for Apple Dictation. Please don't ever go away!

So how I did I solve my problem? The minute I switched from the Croatian flag icon to the American flag icon, my typing resulted in the rendering of correct non-alpha characters and I could resume my web development in VSCode.

This (not so little) glitch probably resulted first from the initial upgrade to Mojave and then the latest update to 10.14.5. If you experience a similar situation, just remember that simply checking to see which language is running on your system and then selecting your language of choice should remedy the issue.

I will be embedding this episode of Plugging in The Holes along with a transcript in the form of a post on interglobalmedianetwork.com for your hearing and reading pleasure. Bye for now!