Or so he thought.
Except—and here was the ghost—his system had a hidden third language: Russian, installed for a translation project months ago. Due to a bug in language list ordering, the legacy default had quietly become Russian. Hence, the phantom Cyrillic. The Override for default input method was the exorcist’s spell. It forced every application—new, old, admin, or sandboxed—to start with a single, unyielding keyboard layout, regardless of the display language or the language list order. Or so he thought
He leaned back, satisfied. The override wasn’t a bug or a legacy leftover—it was a scalpel. Most people used the keyboard settings like a hammer. But for those who needed precision, the override was the difference between a tool that serves you and a machine that fights you every keystroke of the way. Hence, the phantom Cyrillic