[Discuss] "In-place" text editing UX

[jloleysens]

In the Ingest Node Pipelines plugin in Kibana (Home > Stack Management > Ingest Node Pipelines) there is a component that provides an "in-place" or "inline" text editing UX. Specifically when editing a pipeline (see gif).

This component/behaviour seems well suited to living in EUI and should have an accompanying style guide explaining where it can be useful.

For instance, a capability like this can help make certain editing experiences more streamlined while not cluttering up the UI with text boxes or sending users through multiple clicks to edit a value. This is different to the more typical flow of see a thing, click to expand the details, then click edit. Only then is the user presented with a text field to enter or edit a value.

At an implementation level, this could be part of the existing text field component and simply be a prop that gets set to adapt the appearance.

Gif

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[myasonik]

++ If Elastic products are going to have this type of pattern, would love to see it handled in EUI because I worry about individual implementation a11y

[hbharding]

I noticed we do this in a few places in Observability. It looked a little off to me, so I decided to mock up a concept of what this could look like. Perhaps we could have an editable wrapper like this for EuiTitle and EuiText.

GIF

Figma

Explortatory view GIF

[elizabetdev]

There is also a request for in-place title editing in tabs: https://github.com/elastic/eui/issues/6066#issuecomment-1190428665

Something to note that isn't completely reflected in this early design is that we'd like to have as much of the behaviour inline as possible. As in, the naming / editing of tabs, rearranging, deleting etc.

[ThomThomson]

This is such a cool component! Another use case that could be helpful for this is allowing the user to change the title of a visualization when editing it in Lens. The breadcrumb itself could become editable using this component.

https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/140637#issuecomment-1245633391

[MichaelMarcialis]

Hey, gang! Is this inline editing component something that's been prioritized for development by the EUI team? Or is it still in the spec definition/discussion phase? I could swear that I heard somewhere that this was being worked on, I could be misremembering. This proposed component came to mind in discussions I was in with the visualization and dashboard teams regarding whether we could perform inline editing on things like visualization titles, legend labels, etc.

[elizabetdev]

Hi @MichaelMarcialis,

Is this inline editing component something that's been prioritized for development by the EUI team?

It is currently in progress as you can see here: https://github.com/orgs/elastic/projects/1079/views/3

@breehall is the developer working on this, but she's on PTO. She was working with Henry. As soon as she's back we can see what is the current status.

[elizabetdev]

@daveyholler do you have any update on this?

[breehall]

Development is rapidly coming to a close on EuiInlineEdit. Here are a few things that should happen after Inline Edit has merged into main.

✨ What's Up Next?

• [ ] EuiInlineEdit will need to be added to our Figma library (will create a request in the design-system-team repo)
• [ ] We'll work with teams to implement Inline Edit in Kibana and beyond (#6778)