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Better way to complete text editing


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Hi all,

 

I've been using Affinity Designer for many weeks now, and I really am having a hard time enjoying the text tool when it requires me to press 'esc' to end it. It really slows things down, and coming from years of muscle memory w/ Adobe products pressing 'Cmd+Enter', it has been painful accidentally converting text into curves. 

 

Does anyone have a solution to this? Is there some sort of keyboard shortcut I'm not informed about, or a hack for this?

 

Zach

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For me, pressing command + return exits the text entry box.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Me too, but the problem is that it converts it to curves, so the text is no longer editable...

 

So I just noticed. Have you tried just clicking somewhere outside the text entry box? That's what I normally do.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Or you could then use a keyboard shortcut to choose another tool, or just click on one from the tools palette for a one click exit from text entry mode.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I suspect that new muscle memory pathways will be forged, and you'll soon find it quick and easy to press esc without thinking or even looking while you do so. That's how it's working for me; I'm slowly but surely learning to press esc and can find it without looking now.

MacBook Pro 15" 32GB RAM, iPad Pro 12.9" + Magic Keyboard, Apple Pencil.  Software tools of my trade: Affinity Designer | Affinity Publisher | PDF Expert | Drafts | The Archive | Plutio  

https://eandrpublications.com.au

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Yeah that just starts a new text box for me, and I end up needing to press 'esc' anyway. 

 

We're going to change it so that clicking on the canvas only creates new Art text if there wasn't already a text caret showing. This will be in 1.5 beta, so a few weeks away. (We've also made a few other Text tool tweaks, such as hiding the selection while you are typing text.) I hope this helps.

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I suspect that new muscle memory pathways will be forged, and you'll soon find it quick and easy to press esc without thinking or even looking while you do so. That's how it's working for me; I'm slowly but surely learning to press esc and can find it without looking now.

I find the 'esc' button far less intuitive and it's also non-standard -- most OS X apps like Final Cut, as well as adobe suite use Cmd+Return to close it out. I would really love a way to control this behavior in the keyboard shortcuts preferences. I rarely use Cmd+Return to convert text to curves, so I would rather have that be used to exit the tool. 

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We're going to change it so that clicking on the canvas only creates new Art text if there wasn't already a text caret showing. This will be in 1.5 beta, so a few weeks away. (We've also made a few other Text tool tweaks, such as hiding the selection while you are typing text.) I hope this helps.

Thanks -- is there any way we could control the behavior here, perhaps in the Keyboard Shortcuts section of preferences?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Clicking elsewhere to finish editing without creating a new text field would be a good addition.

 

But Cmd+Return is definitely system wide to finish something. (Even sending a text instead of a new line in messaging apps) This is not just an Adobe thing. Look at Keynote. Edit a text field and hit Cmd+Return. Editing is finished.

 

It's even kookier because Cmd+Return does finish editing. It just also converts to curves which you don't notice until you come back and try and edit that text.

 

The ability to convert to curves seems like a useful feature. But so infrequently used. Why not Cmd+Return to finish editing and Cmd+Shift+Return for finish editing and convert to curves?

 

I routinely need to make adjustments to kerning and other paragraph settings immediately after typing out the text. Given the lack of a clear way to finish editing, it's very cumbersome to do that with the text tool currently. Esc is not always clear that I've jumped out of edit mode. Especially if I hit Cmd+A to select all and make changes to character or paragraph.

 

The principal of least surprise would be nice here.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

Yeah, this happened to me too. It feels akward to convert the text into a curve with cmd + enter.

I removed the shortcut to convert into curve to avoid mistakes. That way I can type anything then click outside and press V to control.

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  • 1 year later...

A little late to the party, but the Command-Return got me too. As I recall, that was the soft-return combination in InDesign, so muscle memory took over. Had to undo all sorts of changes to get back to editable text once I realized what had happened. 

 

I finally decided to just remove the Convert to Curves keyboard shortcut. I don't exercise that command often enough to merit a keyboard shortcut—I'll just stick with the menu command in the future.

Mid-2011 iMac 27, 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

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Better late than never The Design Guy.

 

Is there a need to "end" when entering text? Do we "end" when painting or drawing with a line tool? Or just draw another line or click on another tool to do something else? It just seems to be a bit odd to me needing to "end".

 

It's easy to click somewhere else to enter a new text box area or on another tool (like the Move tool or Line tool) to stop entering text and do something else.

 

Maybe I'm missing something  :unsure:

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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Usually I do not "end" text. Usually also my InDesign layouts have extra "V"s here and there because I have tried to move to point tool without "ending" my text entering...

 

:lol:  :lol:  :lol:

 

I know the problem wellv.

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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  • 1 year later...

March 2019...

To this day it still annoys the frikkin' hell out of me, the steps required to just get the transform controls back after editing the text is ridiculous unless you hit escape. And Escape for Apply is the biggest anti-pattern I've ever seen, since in most tools (surprise surprise) it cancels out of your adjustments, and you have to do it over again. So learning to use the Escape button for Apply is actually messing with me using any other tool.

Please.... PLEASE change this behaviour so you can use CMD+Return to get out of text edit mode, or at least set your own shortcut in the settings. 

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image.thumb.png.e1d6744f9d8ee8ff81ac25669300c74c.png

 

Actually I've found a way how you can emulate the functionality using BetterTouchTool. I tried with a shortcut first, which shows the transform handles again but you stay in text edit mode. Using the Key Sequence it works, and you can cancel out of editing and get the transform handles. Still I hope this becomes native behaviour in a later version, but for now this is the way to do it. Hope it helps!

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23 minutes ago, GizmoStudios said:

And Escape for Apply is the biggest anti-pattern I've ever seen ...

There is no need for an "Apply" function in Affinity for text entry -- as others have explained, text is applied as you type, with no need to apply, end, or finalize it to make it part of the document. The Escape key simply provides a way to exit (escape from) text entry mode.

21 minutes ago, GizmoStudios said:

I tried with a shortcut first, which shows the transform handles again but you stay in text edit mode.

When you are entering or editing text, if you want to use the transform handles on the canvas, you just need to move the mouse pointer to the bounding box & it will work the same way that it does with the Move Tool. Since you need to use the mouse pointer to do the transform on the canvas anyway, this avoids the need for any keyboard shortcut & is a much quicker, more efficient workflow.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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1 hour ago, R C-R said:

There is no need for an "Apply" function in Affinity for text entry -- as others have explained, text is applied as you type, with no need to apply, end, or finalize it to make it part of the document. The Escape key simply provides a way to exit (escape from) text entry mode.

When you are entering or editing text, if you want to use the transform handles on the canvas, you just need to move the mouse pointer to the bounding box & it will work the same way that it does with the Move Tool. Since you need to use the mouse pointer to do the transform on the canvas anyway, this avoids the need for any keyboard shortcut & is a much quicker, more efficient workflow.

I really beg to differ, people do want to get out of edit mode in an efficient way. It kind of bugs me that users talk about quirks and bugs, but Affinity staff takes a defensive stand explaining why we, the users are wrong and you are right. There's a good reason why this convention is used in ALL other applications, and it's plain weird that you have to use ESCAPE to get the desired action. If you hit ESCAPE in another tool you cancel out of the edit, so it really is an anti-pattern. There's also a mention of the "V" typos in text because you want to switch to another tool pressing a shortcut, but you can't because guess what.. you're still editing text, and you have to grab your mouse to click out of it. Keyboard > Mouse > Keyboard is not efficient.

But ok, I made my point, and offered an actual solution for those who agree and want better working workflow editing text. Thank you for your rapid response in how it all behaves as it should, and we should simply adapt to quirky UX behaviour.  

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1 hour ago, GizmoStudios said:

There's a good reason why this convention is used in ALL other applications, and it's plain weird that you have to use ESCAPE to get the desired action.

If you mean using the escape key as a shortcut to exit text entry mode, I have at least 3 other apps besides the Affinity ones that use that same convention. It is not that uncommon, particularly among Mac apps that like Affinity can create & edit both text & other object types.

Likewise, I don't use any apps that require me to do anything special to commit, apply, finalize, etc. a text object for it to become a part of the document. At least to me, that is a weird & needless convention, one (I think) invented by Adobe back when Photoshop was widely considered the world's worst app for text entry.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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2 hours ago, GizmoStudios said:

There's a good reason why this convention is used in ALL other applications,

Do you mean CMD Return for exiting text editing? because your ALL equals two of my applications which also accept the escape key to exit text edit and the other applications either give me grief or a simple return when I hit CMD Return while editing text. I will admit that my testing is not exhaustive but I must say I find the convention of the Escape key escaping the text frame to be useful and almost second nature. I would expect to have CMD Return map to something like a Frame Break or Page Break and may do so now that I think about it.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I make a big deal out of this since a lot of apps I own (most Adobe apps) cancel out of your edit when hitting escape, which I think is expected behaviour. It's called ESCAPE for a reason, and it should be used as a cancel action. It wouldn't be such a big deal if you could assign another shortcut to it yourself, but for some reason this is not possible while you can configure most actions as you like. If I have to learn to use escape to get out of editing mode, then I have to learn NOT to hit it in other apps, so again I'll call it what it is, anti-pattern. Call it a good convention all you want and that Adobe is wrong, but 3 years ago this thread was opened, since it confuses a lot of people and it is silly that we don't at least get the option to choose which shortcut to use for this.

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13 minutes ago, GizmoStudios said:

It wouldn't be such a big deal if you could assign another shortcut to it yourself, but for some reason this is not possible

The reason is simple: there is no need for a separate action to commit your changes, so if you want to switch to doing something else you just need to choose another tool. If you decide you didn’t actually want the changes you made, there’s an ‘Undo’ command to deal with that.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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