How to toggle formatting for text after cursor

Aelius
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Aug 16, 2014 5:08 am
Contact:

How to toggle formatting for text after cursor

Postby Aelius » Sat Aug 16, 2014 5:45 am

I just started using CintaNotes and was pleased and amazed at virtually everything about it. The first and only disappointment I've had so far is discovering the way that CintaNotes formats text.

In every piece of software that I have ever used which has text formatting, including Microsoft Word, email, most forums, I've been able to press Ctrl+I (or Ctrl+B or whatever) and every character I type thereafter is italicized until I press Ctrl+I again to untoggle it.

For some reason, in CintaNotes, the only way to format (with italics, bold, etc.) a word or words is to either highlight the text or put the cursor somewhere in the middle of the word before pressing Ctrl+I or Ctrl+B or whatever. This is very cumbersome and inefficient because it requires so many more keypresses to do basic formatting. For example, if I wanted to italicize in CintaNotes the sentence you're reading right now, I'd have to press the following keys: Shift+Up, Shift+Ctrl+Right, Right x9 (i.e. repeated 9 times,) Ctrl+I, Down. That's 14 extra keypresses, not counting the modifier keys held down. Either that, or I have to move my hand away from the keyboard to my mouse, highlight the sentence with my mouse, and then click at the bottom-right to reset the cursor to the correct position to continue typing, and then move my hand back to the keyboard.

Compare this to the standard text formatting used by most other programs: I would simply press Ctrl+I before I began the sentence, since I knew that I wanted to italicize it, then I would type the sentence as normal and press Ctrl+I again after I finish writing the sentence. That's only 4 extra keypresses instead of 14.

(Note: I know that I can press Ctrl+Shift+I to italicize (or bold, or whatever) the whole paragraph, but that can't be used for formatting only parts of the paragraph, such as the word beginning this paragraph you're reading now.)

At first I thought I must be missing an option somewhere, so I searched around the forums here but unfortunately didn't find anything about this issue, which made me even more convinced I was simply missing something obvious. But then I finally found a comment by Alex in the Roadmap saying that implementation of this feature was planned for version 2.5, but it appears not to have been. Is this feature still planned? If not, I'm very confused at why this is the preferred choice for the usage of text formatting.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for CintaNotes!
Thomas Lohrum
Posts: 1324
Joined: Tue Mar 08, 2011 11:15 am

Re: How to toggle formatting for text after cursor

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Sat Aug 16, 2014 8:35 pm

Hi Aelius,

i entirely agree with your post. Thanks a lot. This bug is bothering me too for quite a while now. Alex, may i kindly ask you to fix this in the near future. The bug is violating standard text formatting behaviour. It really should not be necessary to have users write such a complete post. Thank you!

Thomas
gunars
Posts: 234
Joined: Fri Nov 08, 2013 5:35 am
Contact:

Re: How to toggle formatting for text after cursor

Postby gunars » Sat Aug 16, 2014 11:00 pm

Yes, I also agree with Aelius and Thomas.
User avatar
usbpoweredfridge
Posts: 410
Joined: Fri Jan 17, 2014 11:08 pm
Contact:

Re: How to toggle formatting for text after cursor

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Sun Aug 17, 2014 1:40 am

Adding my support too :)
User avatar
CintaNotes Developer
Site Admin
Posts: 5001
Joined: Fri Dec 12, 2008 4:45 pm
Contact:

Re: How to toggle formatting for text after cursor

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Mon Aug 18, 2014 5:20 am

Hi Aelius and welcome to the forum, great to have such people here!

Thanks for your kind words and for raising an important question. Yes, I know that this issue has come up in the past and it is in our pipeline
for a long time already. Unfortunately working with MS RichEdit is extremely tricky and we still couldn't
make the new behavior completely bug free. This change is not as trivial as it sounds, because in many
ways it changes how text formatting is processed.

I was also worried that with text formatting toolbar still unimplemented, it will introduce hidden state.
But it seems that my worries weren't really justified, since so many people want this right now.

So, we're slowly getting there. I expect this "fix" to be released with version 2.8 planned for Mid September.
In the worst case it'll go into 2.9 about a month later.

Hope this helps!
Alex
Aelius
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Aug 16, 2014 5:08 am
Contact:

Re: How to toggle formatting for text after cursor

Postby Aelius » Mon Aug 18, 2014 6:08 am

Wow, awesome! I can't begin to express how appreciative I am at the attention and care given by CintaNotes' developers. I rarely see that from larger software companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. And I don't know why they're so secretive, because like you point out, sometimes certain features may seem trivial and easy to implement, but there may be legitimate reasons for the delayed implementation of those features, such as for technical reasons. But if not for the sort of open and transparent dialogue with the community that you're engaging in now right now, the users may be led to believe that their wishes and concerns are being ignored.

Sadly, not many large software companies are open and transparent with the community like this. Heck, even release notes, change logs, and version histories are sometimes generalized to the point of irrelevance (e.g. "General fixes and improvements") or completely absent at worst (I'm looking at you, Skype!), even among some of the largest software that one would think would benefit the most from more openness and transparency.
User avatar
usbpoweredfridge
Posts: 410
Joined: Fri Jan 17, 2014 11:08 pm
Contact:

Re: How to toggle formatting for text after cursor

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Mon Aug 18, 2014 10:27 am

CintaNotes Developer wrote:I was also worried that with text formatting toolbar still unimplemented


I'm glad that toolbar is coming. I can't think of any program that has rich text (that I have ever used that is), that doesn't have one of these toolbars (I don't spend a great deal of time on the roadmap, so it probably is already listed there and I just missed it).

usb
User avatar
CintaNotes Developer
Site Admin
Posts: 5001
Joined: Fri Dec 12, 2008 4:45 pm
Contact:

Re: How to toggle formatting for text after cursor

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Mon Aug 18, 2014 12:13 pm

Aelius wrote:Wow, awesome! I can't begin to express how appreciative I am at the attention and care given by CintaNotes' developers. I rarely see that from larger software companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

You're welcome! I don't know why it's generally the smaller companies that have better support. Some kind of conundrum, really :) Maybe because good support doesn't scale well. (Hope that if/when we get bigger, the support will only get better ;))

usbpoweredfridge wrote:I'm glad that toolbar is coming. I can't think of any program that has rich text (that I have ever used that is), that doesn't have one of these toolbars (I don't spend a great deal of time on the roadmap, so it probably is already listed there and I just missed it).

Actually it is #2 in the top rated list :D
Alex

Return to “CintaNotes Personal Notes Manager”