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ID Category Severity Reproducibility Date Submitted Last Update
0012119 [DCSS] Bug Report minor always 2019-10-31 21:03 2019-11-21 21:23
Reporter Siegurt View Status public  
Assigned To aidanholm
Priority normal Resolution done  
Status closed   Product Branch 0.24 old branch
Summary 0012119: Main menu doesn't remove old name when typing
Description In the prior versions of the software, when you opened up the main menu and wanted to create a new name for your character, if you started typing, it would erase the prior name first.

The new version of the menu appends to the existing name, so if you just start typing you end up with the name you typed at the end of the old name, you now need to hit backspace enough times to erase the old name before entering a new one.
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(0033569)
Siegurt (reporter)
2019-11-07 22:57

Paste from the forums for those that don't look at it:
[quote="advil"]This change was intentional, because the behavior of name-clearing (and backspace) was extremely unpredictable in general from how standard UI textboxes work. You can now use ctrl-u to clear the name textbox. (I'm not saying we won't continue to try to improve this use case, since there's been a surprising amount of response to this change, just that the exact old behavior probably won't come back.)
[/quote]

Well "Append to the pre-loaded name" is pretty awful UX. What a standard text box would do is:

If your cursor is at end of text, typing appends backspace removes the last character, if you have the whole field highlighted, typing replaces, backspaces clears.

Typically such a text box would start empty.

What *this* change does is change the implicit assumption from "start with the text highlighted" to "start with the cursor at the end of the text, as if you'd just typed it in"

But you *did not* just type it in, it's come in pre-loaded from your prior game, there's plenty of examples of pre-loaded text boxes starting highlighted when the expectation is that you would want to type something new in altogether if you wanted to change it, but since there's no visual indicator of highlighting in DCSS's name field, you end up in this ambiguous situation, which someone arbitrarily decided should go the other way.

The new method is unfortunately *completely* useless to the user, there's almost never a situation where you just want to append to your prior character's name (or remove a couple characters from the end), you either want to take it as-is or replace or remove it)

So if you want to make it clear *and* useful, you either need to implement highlighting text in the name field, along with a proper visual indicator, and start with the pre-loaded name highlighted.
Which is probably too much work, next best option would be to revert the change to a useful, but possibly less-than-predictable outcome (which takes all of 2 seconds to get used to once, rather than the current overhead of backspacing over the character's name every time you want to change it).

A less optimal solution would be to fix it so that the options actually worked, and you could set an option for 'start with a blank name' although that's strictly worse than the old way (as it makes the default not "load from the last played character")

Control-U is also pretty odd as a 'clear this text field' shortcut, is that some kind of standard thing that I haven't come across? (it's not vim/emacs/anythingwindows/visual studio) nor do I see it in any help documentation (you'd want a hit for something esoteric like that on the menu, but that's a lot of clutter we probably don't want)

At least if there's going to be a 'clear this field' shortcut it probably should be something that someone could reasonably guess, probably involving backspace or delete (like shift-backspace or shift-delete or something)
(0033573)
aidanholm (developer)
2019-11-10 13:01

Thanks for reporting. The original behaviour is not easy to restore, but I've changed it so that backspace will clear the name if it is the first key pressed, and work normally otherwise. Commit at https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/355392fac7f9 [^]

- Issue History
Date Modified Username Field Change
2019-10-31 21:03 Siegurt New Issue
2019-11-07 02:01 The_Fireplace Issue Monitored: The_Fireplace
2019-11-07 22:57 Siegurt Note Added: 0033569
2019-11-10 13:01 aidanholm Note Added: 0033573
2019-11-10 13:01 aidanholm Status new => resolved
2019-11-10 13:01 aidanholm Fixed in Branch => 0.25 development branch
2019-11-10 13:01 aidanholm Resolution open => done
2019-11-10 13:01 aidanholm Assigned To => aidanholm
2019-11-21 21:22 Siegurt Status resolved => closed


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