Keyboard & editor behaviour

[kurahaupo]

This is a grab-bag of some issues I've noticed while using different keyboard layouts.

1. (bug) Occasionally, the app will get into a mode where certain "whole sentence" features of the keyboard stop working, which is a big deal when using a "swipe" keyboard; in particular,

   • no auto-repeat on backspace
   • swiping words completely fails unless I manually insert a space after the preceding word

   My impression is that the app gets into a state where it's sending some sort of "soft reset" or "pause" to the keyboard after every received event, so that the keyboard goes into "safe mode" and cannot perform contextually relevant operations.

   To get out of this state requires not just closing the visible app, but exiting from the connection view back to the server list (and then closing the app as well). I don't think it's necessary to shut down the background portion of the app, but I can't be sure.

2. (bug) Sometimes colour and format codes go awry, so that what's seen after sending is not what the edit looked like. I'm still working on a way to replicate it, but it seems more likely to happen when simply tapping the format buttons before typing, and less likely if selecting text and then tapping to apply the format. Commonly the result looks like the "close" or "plain" code is missing, so that the latter half of a message is unexpectedly all (say) in italics; however I have occasionally seen the reverse - the first half of a message is unexpectedly all in italics.

3. (feature request) Please can we have an "undo" button while editing? accidentally erasing a large chunk of some long explanation is frustrating, as is accidentally changing it to black-on-black.

4. (feature request) Please can the "format" panel either be pinned, or can it be added to the edit menu even when the text box is empty?

5. (feature request) Please can "default colour" be an explicit option from the colour picker, to return the text to the state it would be without a colour code, but without removing other attributes such as underlining.

6. (feature request) In some keyboard layouts - notably the "Hackers Keyboard" layout - the return key is between the backspace button and the arrow keys, and the return key acts as "send". This makes it all too easy to inadvertently send a broken message while trying to fix it, making one look rather foolish. I would like to be able to make sure that "enter" is not treated as "send", on all layouts, not just "Gboard".

[kurahaupo]

It relation to item 2, perhaps adding a mode to have "visible format codes" while editing, so that it's immediately apparent when the format codes are being inserted wrongly.

I suggest either

1. displaying all control codes within the text using the "visible ASCII control representations" provided by Unicode at \u2400 ~ \u241f

    | mIRC          | bytes     | ASCII | Unicode visible   |
    | bold          | \x02      |  STX  | \u2402       | ␂  |
    | color         | \x03 C,C  |  ETX  | \u2403 C,C   | ␃  |
    | reset         | \x0f      |  SI   | \u240f       | ␏  |
    | monospace     | \x11      |  DC1  | \u2411       | ␑  |
    | inverse       | \x16      |  SYN  | \u2416       | ␖  |
    | ANSI          | \x1b \x5b |  CSI  | \u241b\u005b | ␛[ |
    | italic        | \x1d      |  GS   | \u241d       | ␝  |
    | strikethrough | \x1e      |  RS   | \u241e       | ␞  |
    | underline     | \x1f      |  US   | \u241f       | ␟  |

2. Or, displaying functional symbols, such as:

    | function      | symbol |
    | bold          | ☗      |
    | color reset   | ☒      |
    | color fg      | ▫      | displayed with new colour
    | color fg,bg   | ▯      | displayed with new colours
    | reset         | ╳      |
    | monospace     | ℱ      |
    | inverse       | ▚      |
    | ANSI          | ℮[     |
    | italic        | ╱      |
    | strikethrough | ⊨      |
    | underline     | ▂ or ␣ |

[MCMrARM]

This bug will hopefully be partially addressed in 0.6.