Edit free text annotations by double-clicking on them in the timeline

[JulianKniephoff]

Idea: Double click opens the annotation in the list of annotation and activates the edit option (as if I would have clicked on the pen icon.

[JulianKniephoff]

Remember that this should only be allowed for your own tracks. See #293.

[dagraf]

Thumbs up for this idea.

[JulianKniephoff]

I thought about the overloading of the double click function we talked about again and I'm not sure this is a good idea. If every annotation you jump to would also go into edit mode, after some time a lot of annotations that you actually didn't want to edit might end up in edit mode.

You could say that deselecting an annotation should leave edit mode, but that would lead to very janky behavior, probably, considering that annotations also get selected and deselected by the playhead. Now, whether or not that is a good idea is a whole other question. IMO these things should be differentiated by the tool. But that is not an easy change at the moment, unfortunately.

Another idea might be something like this:

• If you single-click an annotation that is not selected, it becomes selected.
• If you single-click an already selected annotation, the playhead jumps there.
• If you double click an already selected annotation, edit mode is toggled.

This loses us the ability to deselect annotations by clicking on them again, though. I don't know how important that is; you can still deselect by selecting something else or clicking into some white space on the timeline. Or you can click the annotation in the list view.¹

We could also take a step back and ask why we want this: To get to edit mode faster, right? Would adding the edit button to the list view even in collapsed state help? Or maybe a keyboard shortcut? We could even consider adding an edit button somewhere in or around the annotation itself, although that could get cluttered very quickly. :thinking:

Thoughts?

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1: We might actually want to consider making the corresponding changes to the list view as well, though, to keep it consistent. :thinking: ↩

[dagraf]

Why we want this:

1. Because with annotation with anchors moving them around or clicking on the a second time is very difficult with the playhead 'hiding' almost the whole clickable annotation.
2. Because the feature "clicking on an annotation > play head jumps to its position" is crucial for a lot of scenarios.

Your idea of "single-click an already selected annotation to make the playhead jump" I do not like because then I can not directly jump the playhead to the beginning of an annotation. Instead I have to select first, wait a bit and the click again.

Possible solution:

• If you single-click an annotation that is not selected, it becomes selected.
• If you single-click on an annotation that is selected, it becomes deselected. (This option is not important.)
• If you double-click an annotation that is not selected OR an already selected annotation, the playhead jumps there and the annotation gets/stays selected.
• Make the corresponding changes to the list view as well.
• Add the edit button to the list view even in collapsed state help. Hint: This led to a performance issue when the tool was developped.

Thoughts?