Comment by malloc2x | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malloc2x | Hacker News Reader

But does it work?

A couple minutes of basic usage (FF20, Linux) have me in pain:

- CTRL-B (and presumably other shortcuts) doesn't always take effect immediately. Sometimes there is delay, sometimes it seems necessary to let go of CTRL for the event to get flushed, sometimes nothing ever happens at all. Multiple hits without letting go of CTRL also behave erratically.

- Focus stays on formatting buttons and requires manual click to get back to text widget. Several times I wondered where my text was, only to realize focus was on wrong widget.

- By far the worst thing: the way formatting codes are handled leaves me crying for WordPerfect's Reveal Codes. Make some text bold, unbold the text after it, type something right after the bolded text, it isn't bold, hit enter for new line and type something, now it became bold again. Argh!

I like the idea of this, but presently there are some rough edges.

Thanks for reporting this. I didn't test under Linux as I don't have a linux box handy. We bind keyboard events to jquery keydown. Is it better to bind to something else for FF/Linux?

More testing:

* On Chromium 25 and Chrome 26 the first two issues do not exist.

* More playing with FF20 and it seems this is actually tied to CTRL+B, not any other shortcut. At least initially, clicking the "Bold" button also has no effect. Possible explanation: In FF CTRL+B opens the Bookmarks pane by default, in practice certain focus combinations do open this pane. This explanation would seem to require the Bold widget to be generating a keypress under the hood, though.

* The codes issue is tricky, but one way to see an example on Chrome/chromium browsers is:

  1. refresh page
  2. select pre-existing "Go ahead..." text
  3. type "this is bold and this is not"
  4. select "this is bold" and make it bold
  5. place cursor at start of " and this is not"
  6. type "so is this", text is bold
  7. hit enter and type "but this isn't", it isn't bold

The original issue I saw was similar, but related to numbered bullet lists. To reproduce the third issue on FF follow the same steps, except a) one must first mash about on CTRL+B and/or the Bold button until they start working, then follow same steps. Result: you get the inverse, text in 6 is not bold, and text in 7 is.

Sorry, don't have domain knowledge about keybinding.

I was able to reproduce the first two problems in FF on Linux, but not Chrome (everything seems to work perfectly there). It seems to be FF's problem, not Linux's.

Firefox on OSX works fine... so it's a combination. I don't have a linux box handy to test, but it would be nice if you could see if keydown is the problem, and if so we'll change it.

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