At some point (maybe quite some time ago? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t more than about a month, though) something changed (at least for me) in the LW comment editor, and not for the better. Perhaps it was when “LessWrong Docs [Beta]” became the default editor? I have no recollection of when that actually was, though. I’d try in “Draft JS”, which I assume was the previous WYSIWYG-ish editor, but when I try to select that the result is that I cannot enter anything in the comment box until I switch back to a different editing mode :-).
Under certain circumstances, attempting to type a space has the result of deleting a load of the text I have just typed. This is really annoying.
The simplest such circumstance is if I do ctrl-4 to start typing some mathematics, finish by pressing Enter (I thought it used to be possible to press the right-arrow key with the same effect, by the way, but if so it has stopped working) and then press a space, which is usually what I want after a bit of inline mathematics. Result: the mathematical thing I just entered disappears.
Another situation, presumably related: I enter some mathematics, carefully remember not to press space after it (instead typing some other stuff, then moving my cursor back and then entering a space), and at some point later in that paragraph I put some text in italics. Ctrl-I, stuff-in-italics, ctrl-I, space. Boom! Everything from the start of the earlier mathematical formula gets deleted.
I’m using a recent version of Firefox, in Windows 10.
[EDITED to add:] Oh, quite possibly also relevant: I am using the NoScript extension to Firefox, and some of the vast number of domains that LW pages pull in have scripts blocked: googletagmanager.com, intercom.io, lr-ingest.io, sentry.io. None of those seems like it should cause this sort of thing if blocked, but who knows?
Yeah, this seems likely a bug in the new editor. The editor is currently only available to people who have opted into beta features, and this specific bug is indeed the reason why we haven’t shipped it fully yet. It appears to be a bug in the editor framework we are using that interacts weirdly with the LaTeX editor that I wrote, and it’s been on my to-do list to track down and fix.
No worries! I think we should probably have it say “[Beta]” or something like that right next to features that are indeed the result of being opted-into beta features, ideally with a small hover that reminds people that they’ve opted into seeing those features.
It does in fact say “LessWrong Docs [Beta]” right there in the comment box. But I didn’t have the wit to interpret that correctly as “you’re only seeing this because you signed up to enjoy new and unstable things” rather than as “this is a new thing we’re rolling out even though it might be a little flaky”.
At some point (maybe quite some time ago? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t more than about a month, though) something changed (at least for me) in the LW comment editor, and not for the better. Perhaps it was when “LessWrong Docs [Beta]” became the default editor? I have no recollection of when that actually was, though. I’d try in “Draft JS”, which I assume was the previous WYSIWYG-ish editor, but when I try to select that the result is that I cannot enter anything in the comment box until I switch back to a different editing mode :-).
Under certain circumstances, attempting to type a space has the result of deleting a load of the text I have just typed. This is really annoying.
The simplest such circumstance is if I do ctrl-4 to start typing some mathematics, finish by pressing Enter (I thought it used to be possible to press the right-arrow key with the same effect, by the way, but if so it has stopped working) and then press a space, which is usually what I want after a bit of inline mathematics. Result: the mathematical thing I just entered disappears.
Another situation, presumably related: I enter some mathematics, carefully remember not to press space after it (instead typing some other stuff, then moving my cursor back and then entering a space), and at some point later in that paragraph I put some text in italics. Ctrl-I, stuff-in-italics, ctrl-I, space. Boom! Everything from the start of the earlier mathematical formula gets deleted.
I’m using a recent version of Firefox, in Windows 10.
[EDITED to add:] Oh, quite possibly also relevant: I am using the NoScript extension to Firefox, and some of the vast number of domains that LW pages pull in have scripts blocked: googletagmanager.com, intercom.io, lr-ingest.io, sentry.io. None of those seems like it should cause this sort of thing if blocked, but who knows?
Yeah, this seems likely a bug in the new editor. The editor is currently only available to people who have opted into beta features, and this specific bug is indeed the reason why we haven’t shipped it fully yet. It appears to be a bug in the editor framework we are using that interacts weirdly with the LaTeX editor that I wrote, and it’s been on my to-do list to track down and fix.
Aha. Fair enough! I’d forgotten that I explicitly opted in to beta features :-).
No worries! I think we should probably have it say “[Beta]” or something like that right next to features that are indeed the result of being opted-into beta features, ideally with a small hover that reminds people that they’ve opted into seeing those features.
It does in fact say “LessWrong Docs [Beta]” right there in the comment box. But I didn’t have the wit to interpret that correctly as “you’re only seeing this because you signed up to enjoy new and unstable things” rather than as “this is a new thing we’re rolling out even though it might be a little flaky”.