Make the Cursor Jump to Description block

I was not sure if this was supposed to go in feature requests or bug reports so i ended up choosing bug reports.

So I faced the issue when you finish writing a title and then press enter on Anytype android the cursor abruptly jumps to new block instead of description box… Sometimes I use description for some page’s and its annoying that I have to go back and tap on it.

It just breaks the flow of writing.

You can see the video I’ve attached.
screen-20210623-135308.mp4

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What does shift enter?

This would be more preferably I think, as it belongs to the title

@wemiprog Does it really though? I mean it is “anchored” there, yes. But it’s a “relation”. It seems like this would be the equivalent of saying that Properties on Notion pages “belong” to the title just because they’re at the top of the layout. But I could be wrong, maybe that’s how they implemented it…

But in any case for me shift-enter would not be intuitive because Description is a separate field. Shift-enter usually creates new lines within same field, without “committing” the text/edit.

The behavior is observed even for the backspace key which makes it a bit weird. When you’re pressing backspace key in the first block, once it’s over, it’s intutive that the cursor moves to the previous line which in this case is the description line. But currently, the cursor skips the description line and jumps to the title

@lynxlove I think maybe this confusion is mainly arising because the Description field currently looks so similar to the normal Block text. But they’re not the same. I think Irene’s request here speaks to the issue:

https://community.anytype.io/t/-/1255

If you’re familiar with Notion, what you’re suggesting is like if you were at the top of the main Page contents, and you hit Backspace until the very beginning of page, and then expected it should jump up to the bottom-most Property to continue editing. Does that make sense? Here’s an example, and Notion does the exact same thing, in this case skipping all the Properties and jumping up to the Title (and pulling any remaining text of that block from page contents up with it!)

@Oshyan Maybe a horizontal rule between the property and the actual page like the one in your GIF should reduce the confusion I guess?

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Nonetheless, there should be a “keyboard-way” to move out of/highlight the Title and Description block (be it Enter or Shift-Enter or Tab). Currently you have to use your mouse to move out of the text block which is a bit of annoyance.

I prefer tabs since those feel very natural to how we fill out forms on web as well (and it’s become some kinda defactor standard across applications that I’ve used everywhere).

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I agree with both your suggestions. We need A: some formatting to make clear that the “description” is not just a normal text block (I believe the devs have already said this will happen), and B: a way to move between “relation” blocks, which may need to be different from regular text blocks. I too would favor Tab. Currently Tab appears to just bring you back to the beginning of the current block text, so it seems it’s not in use? If so, it should definitely be set to move between blocks in linear order down the page. And that should start with and include the Title as well as Description.

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You guys are awesome, we thought and discussed reletion and object interfaces just the way you do :heart_eyes_cat:

You will have the ability to work with relations as blocks or with a custom interface with all of them in one place.

So here is a sneak peak of what i’m saying:

4 Likes

@Vova this looks cool

@Sedulous since the version you reported this issue for a lot of changes have been made to the Android app. The behavior for Page objects (with a description field/relation) now is:

When adding content:

Action Android Windows
You can type a page title Yes Yes
You can use the return key to move out of the title field No Yes
You can type a description Yes Yes
You can use the return key to move out of the description field and move to the canvas to start adding blocks Yes Yes

When removing content:

Action Android Windows
You can use the backspace key to remove a block Yes Yes
After removing the last block, you can use the backspace key to continue to remove characters from title/descirption Yes, but the cursor will skip the description field Yes, after removing blocks the curor jumps to the description field
When the cursor is in front of the first block on the page, you can use the backspace key to merge the contents of that block with the title/description No, see message in print screen below Yes, with description, but not with title

I guess this is not yet the desired behavior on Android? It is at least not consistent with Windows. Not sure about iOS, MacOS and LInux.

Summarizing this topic:

  • Behavior of using Return, Backspace, and Tab keys should be uniform across platforms
  • There should be a clear distinction in representation and navigation between Blocks (text/Relation/other) and Featured Relations (description, other featured Relations)
  • Preference seems to be:
    • Return key to add a new Block below the current Block (Title), skipping the Featured Relations section (such as Description). Any content after the cursor should be moved into the newly added Block, moving all other content one place down.
    • Backspace key as reverse of Return key, so when the beginning of a Block is reached, the cursor should jump to the end of the previous Block, skipping the Featured Relations section that is in between the current Block and the Block above (Title)
    • Tab key at the end of a Title Block to move to the first (and subsequent) Featured Relation(s)
    • Shift+Tab key combo as reverse of Tab key, so moving to the previous Featured Relation and when the first Featured Relation is reached, the cursor ends up at the end of the first Block (Title)

Does that cover everything? :slight_smile:

See a (longer) recording of the current behavior on Windows here:

@sambouwer Hi, can we close this issue? Looks like it’s fixed in latest version.

Thanks for checking! I’ve assigned this one to myself as a reminder to test this in the coming days.

Hi @Sedulous, the original issue is indeed resolved!

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