Typing / in a note or ticket

  • 5 September 2018
  • 9 replies
  • 109 views

I have keyboard shortcuts switched off, but EVERY TIME I type a "/" character into a support ticket (which I do a lot) it pops up a menu to search canned responses (which I want NEVER) and it's annoying the hell out of me.



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How do I make that "typing a / pops up a menu and ruins your train of thought" feature to go away and never come back?



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9 replies

Userlevel 4
Badge +12

Hello Bencurthoys,


The Quick actions (that's how we call it) help you to quickly search for canned responses/solution articles while you're on the typing mode. Its sad to know that its causing some kind of discomfort for you.


If you don't intend to use a lot of canned responses/articles in your ticket replies, I will check with the team if there's an option to disable this for your profile (which is unlikely but I'll give it a shot).

However, if you hit the 'Esc' button after keying in '/', the suggestion popup should go away. Do you think this can help in the interim?


Cheers!

What happens is that I'm typing a sentence like "What I think would help is feature A / feature B" and when I type the "/" all the rest of the sentence goes into the search form and I've already typed "feature B" by the time I notice the popup has happened and then I mash ESC until it goes away and then usually the "unsaved changes" dialog then pops up because ESC means not only "cancel this annoying dialog" but also "stop writing this reply and discard changes" which are two very different things for the same key. And ESC also cancels the "unsaved changes" dialog, which basically means it flickers for a bit, and then I completely lose my flow.


So I'm then back at "What I think would help is feature A /c" and then I have to carefully and very very slowly edit the line to that the "c" goes away and I'm left with the / which is all I wanted.


So no. Pressing "ESC" to cancel the intrusive popup is not an acceptable workaround.


The UNIVERSAL convention on keyboard shortcuts is that you hold down CTRL or ALT to access them whilst typing. If it was CTRL+/ or ALT+/ to pop up the form that would be fine. It's totally unacceptable that a normal bit of punctuation without a modifier key triggers it.


Userlevel 4
Badge +12

@Bencurthoys Hitting the 'Esc' key when you type '/' in the reply is a temporary workaround to skip the quick actions suggestions from showing up. The problem with the current set up is that the first item is auto-selected when you type in '/c' or '/s' and so you've to escape the suggestions to continue.


We'll skip the auto-selection by default so that your typing experience is not hampered and will select the options only when you use keys to select an item from the suggestion list. I'll keep you posted on the changes :)


Cheers!

Userlevel 4
Badge +12

@Bencurthoys We've rolled out a fix today that will automatically close the Quick actions popup when you hit 'space'. Hope this helps :)

This is a real bummer that because of one person, I can no longer hit “Space” to start searching after I type /c or /s. I was able to hit space after typing / and it would start searching the canned responses, and that was faster than having to hit Enter. Is there any other key you can use to accommodate the issue this one person seems to be having?


Much better. Thanks. 


Workflow

https://xkcd.com/1172/


Inevitable XKCD.


Possible solutions that would have been more sensible ways of the hooking the popup into the text editor that having it appear whenever anyone typed a / for any reason whatsoever:


* Make it possible to switch the functionality off - e.g. by turning off "Keyboard Shortcuts" - if you don't want your typing interfered with

* Stop the functionality from triggering if you have ZERO canned responses in your database.

* Use a control code like ctrl+/ to trigger the popup instead and leave normal typing as normal

* Allow "space" to dismiss the popup if it's the first thing that's typed after "/" but leaving it as the previous behavior if you've typed /c or /s



Userlevel 4
Badge +12

@Bencurthoys Thanks for sharing the link. The comic is pure - GOLD!

Tagging this along with keyboard shortcuts is something that we can try and accommodate for future release. Making it appear on a keystroke combo means the option would be hidden and a lot of people might not actually discover it. Thanks for the suggestions again - we'll see what others have to say with the change and work on improving the experience with Quick Actions.


@AssemblerPro5 That's very unfortunate 😞 We've been receiving a lot of feedback from other users as well to remove the focus on hitting 'space' after typing '/' as they were finding it difficult to add conditional values in their replies.


Cheers!



Thanks guys 🙂 I do understand it doesn’t work for some or it does for others. I am getting used to hitting Enter now. I would like to see the new Canned Forms added to the Quick Actions in the future as well, since I think the forms will be very useful.