Please block escape key from exiting full-screen mode when text input has focus

[garrettm30]

The default Mac behavior for full-screen apps is, unfortunately, to move the app out of full screen when the escape key is pressed. Presumably because of how often the escape is useful in Affinity apps, that default behavior has been deliberately blocked in most circumstances. In a thread started back in 2015, Serif staff member MattP explained, “I can keep hammering the escape key and it never leaves full screen,” and a few posts later made clear that this was by design (bold emphasis is mine):
 

On 4/10/2015 at 8:01 AM, MattP said:

Hi George,

 

I've tried it on both my machines at work and I've asked AndyT to try his as well and can confirm that as long as you've got a document open, hitting Escape doesn't exit full screen mode - we deliberately soak up the message to stop you accidentally exiting the full screen mode... So I don't know what the difference is between our machines and yours?

 

Matt

 

However, occasionally Affinity apps do exit full-screen mode with escape, and this seemingly random behavior has bugged me for a few years without my being able to determine how to trigger it. Finally, I found out that it will reliably exit full screen when escape is pressed any time a text input has focus, such as the horizontal scale input in the Character panel (Position & Transform section). In fact, the original thread I quoted from above was started because of this behavior, and after several backs and forth, the OP @eejits finally found a recipe (pressing escape while the opacity input in the Layers panel has focus). Once a recipe was finally identified, MattP said:

 

On 4/20/2015 at 4:26 AM, MattP said:

Ah, thanks for that - that sounds like something that's probably fixable then... I'll talk to Andy Tang about it and see what he says

 

However, we never got any followup, maybe because it is such an old post buried in the pre-V2 questions archive. My post is to request that that this issue finally be “fixed.” I am very tempted to post this as a bug, except I hesitate only because this is default Mac behavior. However, as Serif has chosen to deliberately prevent this behavior in most cases, this is at least an inconsistency worth considering.

In the current form, I often end up accidentally leaving full screen multiple times a day if I accidentally hit escape too many times. And currently there is no way to remove focus from a text input by keyboard, except to move focus to another input by tab, which is no better. The only way is to remove focus seems to be to click out, but you have to be really careful where you “click out,” because that click action usually also does something else, like moving the insertion point or deselecting the selected text or object. I have discovered that I can click on certain UI dead spaces, such as the empty space in the Pages panel. But it is not the most intuitive, when escape is what decades of experience have taught us to use for such cases.