fix: moonwalking on a mac (and every other key the modifiers broke)

[Colin-Moran]

the hedgehog has been telling mac users to hold alt for the better part of a
year. mac users do not have an alt. worse, the key that is there rewrites
every other key you press, which the controls were not ready for at all.

what was broken

controls.ts mapped keys off event.key, which is what a keypress produces
rather than which key you pressed. hold a modifier and the browser rewrites it:
macOS turns ⌥+a into "å", and every platform turns shift+a into "A". neither
of those is in the map, so:

what you do	what happened
⌥ + A to moonwalk on a mac	nothing. the flagship feature, dead on arrival
shift + D to run with WASD	nothing (arrows worked, so nobody noticed)
walk, then grab ⌥ or shift, then let go	the keyup arrives as "å"/"A", never matches the keydown, and the key is never released. the hog walks off and never comes back
ctrl+d to open the debug renderer	we claimed it too, so he sprints right while you debug
⌘+D, then anything	macOS swallows the keyup while ⌘ is held. see above. he's gone

what changed

resolve from event.code instead. that's the physical key, so KeyA stays
KeyA no matter what's held down with it, with an event.key fallback for the
mobile keyboards that don't report a code. then:

• release everything on blur, because browsers don't send keyup for keys
  that were down when the window lost focus. alt-tab mid-stride no longer
  sentences him to walk forever.
• leave ⌘/ctrl chords to the browser, which is where they belong.
• call it ⌥ option on apple devices, alt everywhere else.
• write the controls down: a table in the README, and a line in the in-game
  cheat sheet (cheatcodes), where they had never been documented at all.

while i was in there: HedgehogActorControls built a teardown function and then
threw it away, so every hedgehog leaked two window listeners for the life of the
page. it now has a destroy() and beforeUnload calls it. konami code spawns
10,000 hedgehogs, which was 20,000 listeners, which is a lot of retention.

how it was tested

unit tests on the resolver (keyboard.test.ts, platform.test.ts) covering the
⌥/shift rewrites, the no-code fallback, and the label.

then, because "trust me, it walks now" is exactly the kind of pr description
this hedgehog makes fun of, i measured it. built main and this branch, and
read the player hog's real walkSpeed out of the running game for each case:

scenario	before	after
release a while ⌥ held	-2, still walking	0
release a while shift held	-2, still walking	0
⌥ + a (moonwalk)	0, nothing	-1.6, facing right
shift + a (run)	0, nothing	-4
ctrl+d	+2, off he goes	0
blur mid-walk	-2, still walking	0
arrow keys	-2 / 0	-2 / 0, unchanged

pnpm test, pnpm lint and pnpm build (engine, playground, extension
typecheck) all pass. also loaded the unpacked extension and confirmed the fix
ships in content.js. the extension is where this bit hardest, since ⌘+L and
⌘+Tab are keys you actually press on a real website.

not fixed here

the hogwars title screen still tells you to hold ALT to moonwalk. that branch
is a museum piece and i'm not touching it, but it does suggest the assumption
runs deeper than one file.

nothing else changed. arrows, space, drop-through, fire and web-climbing all
behave exactly as before. he's just no longer at the mercy of whichever modifier
you happened to be resting a finger on.

[vercel]

@Colin-Moran is attempting to deploy a commit to the PostHog Team on Vercel.

A member of the Team first needs to authorize it.

[benjackwhite]

this is a solid fix and great PR - thanks!

[vercel]

The latest updates on your projects. Learn more about Vercel for GitHub.

Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated
hedgehog-mode	Ready	Preview	Sep 10, 2026 8:34am UTC