Undo option for text editing

Feature Proposal
1

Sometimes while typing a long message on the phone, I accidentally select a large chunk of the message and overwrite or delete it, as the controls are quite fiddly. In these cases I really miss having an “undo” option in the context menu! Even if only the last action can be undone, this would be incredibly helpful when accidents happen.

2

that seems to be a general Android flaw, in general the input fields support “Undo” (eg. by Ctrl-Z when using an external keyboard) - but many android keyboards seem not to add a gesture for that, Samsung seems to be an exception.

maybe you can get the same using another keyboard.

so, not sure, if it is worth doing extra-things here, i have the gut feeling, that easily gets complicated :slight_smile: and seems most Android users do not care :man_shrugging: are e.g. WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram offering something comparable?

3

AnySoftKeyboard has undo feature IIRC, this is something that the keyboard should provide

2 Likes
4

Thanks @r10s for the insight and @adbenitez for the recommendation.

1 Like
5

Btw, on desktop it would be nice to have an option to invoke an external text editor. Some advanced text editors even have an “undo tree” so you can undo typing, then type smth else but still have the first version available.

6

that is way too nerd, the kind of people that would like to do that probably would prefer if the whole client would be in the editor, for example I would really like to have an emacs plugin to use DC inside emacs then I can fully navigate with keyboard and all the nice advanced editing and macros

1 Like
7

I think creating a good Emacs plugin is a very hard task. It’s just like supporting one more platform. Maybe the REPL tool should be improved (also a hard task, but at least it already exists), then you can run it in e.g. term mode in Emacs, but you probably should switch from the char mode to the line mode to edit text. But then it’s not clear how to display images etc. Invoking an external text editor is at least easy to implement. Even though other things like convenient navigation through chats in Emacs using all your twelve fingers remains unresolved, editing text seems the most important part of the story.