[webkit-dev] Overtype mode in WebKit for editable content?

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 9:50 AM, Sergio Villar Senin <svillar at igalia.com>wrote:

> I know that WK follows the NSTextView implementation but FF for example
> does not show the remote insert issue.
>

Yes, it does.  Firefox simply uses heuristics to guess which type of
character LTR/RTL you're about to type.  They still have the same issue.

 > The problem here is that caret will be on top of a wrong character.
> >  That's much worse than a character being inserted at a remote location.
> >  Using my existing example, what user sees is:
> > 123CBA or 123CBA
> > yet what will be replaced is 1.  That's insane.
> >
> > This is orders of magnitude worse than caret showing up as a vertical
> > line at this location:
> > 123|CBA
>
> Yeah I understood you example, it was very descriptive. What I wanted to
> share with you is that, in your same example, in "Insert" mode, placing
> the caret at (3) will insert the next character before the 1. Isn't that
> insane too?
>

No.  The caret simply shows the logical insertion point.

 > And this is why just setting the width of caret will never work.
>
> Well, I have a pretty compact patch more or less ready to be uploaded to
> bz that in the case of the caret being placed at (3) just draws the
> classical 1px width bar (it also draws the thin bar in the case of being
> after the last character), so although the replaced character is in any
> case the 1, the insanity you mention is somehow minimized.
>

That doesn't sound right either.  It's much more confusing than not setting
any width at all because the overtype mode is still on.

What we need to do is here to use selection.  We need to have 1-character
long text selection at all time except at the end of each line when
overtype is on since selection code already deals with the said bidi
craziness.  Anything short of that isn't landable quality.

- R. Niwa
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