Drummer as a writing environment

[dcoletta]

I started actually writing some blog today!

Here are a few observations about the mechanics of writing inside of Drummer. (I'm using Chrome on macOS 11.6.)

I'm not necessarily saying I think it should be different, just that these were surprises to me based on past experience editing text on the Mac.

• Clicking and dragging across text doesn't select it.
• Cursor navigation keys don't all do what I expect. I would expect to be able to use ctrl-up and ctrl-down arrows to move the cursor by end of lines.
• I can't find a way to break one outline entry into two using a simple keyboard command. I would have expected to be able to press return in the middle of an entry to split it into two. I think maybe the only way to do this is with copy and paste?
• I'd like to be able to double-click-and-drag to select a word at a time.

[dcoletta]

OK I found Cmd-Return to split an entry. But I can't seem to undo it -- need to copy/paste to undo it?

[mistersugar]

@dcoletta for your third bullet

that functionality exists - see the Keyboard summary under Docs, and look at the last items in the Reorganizing section. That is, you can use Command-return to break a paragraph and Command Backspace to merge lines.

[scripting]

Look at the Docs menu.

[mistersugar]

also, nice title for this issue. I wrote this post this week about how Drummer fits my old-school style of writing and editing.

[jackbaty]

Glad to hear that the unusual text selection behavior isn't just me! I have to shift-click to select a range of text (most, but not all of the time). I keep trying different browsers and disabling extensions but no luck. I've overlooked it thus far because I'm having so much fun with everything else in Drummer, but eventually something should probably be done to improve it if possible.

Stock macOS shortcuts are inconsistently supported. CTRL-e correctly goes to end of line but CTRL-a selects all the node's text rather than going to the beginning of line. I'm sure this is challenging, given different platforms, etc. but I'd really like my hardwired shortcuts :).

Overall, I still feel that outliners make the best writing environments.

[kwebble]

Keyboard handling in Drummer is quite different from common Windows text editing. My muscle memory repeatedly causes something different too happen from what I expected. My experiences:

Text mode

• Cursor-Up and Cursor-Down do not move the cursor to the other lines of the text, but to a different node.
• Cursor-Down followed by Cursor-Up positions the cursor in a different location in the line the where it came from.
• Ctrl-Backspace does not remove the previous word. It joins text with the previous node and drops out of text mode. When followed by an Undo (Ctrl-Z) the data is not restored, instead the node with the combined lines is copied.
• I hit Esc several times to get out of text mode back into structured mode.
• Backspace on an empty node does not remove that node as I expected.

Structure mode

• It would be useful if Cursor-Down would also move down to nodes at a different level if there are no more nodes at the current level.
• Enter does only switch to text mode, it also adds a node.
• Expected Ctrl-Up and Ctrl-Down to move nodes Up/Down in the structure. I can use use those keys blindly, Ctrl-U/Ctr-D takes a bit longer.