Problems with the long text field

This is my first post on this forum. I just recently started using SeaTable, coming from AirTable, and so far I’m loving it. The only thing I have a problem with is the long text editor. I will list some problems with it hoping that the SeaTable developers read this.

  1. If I have a long text cell selected in a table and start writing, what I write immediately replaces the content of the cell. This is excepted behaviour for cells with shorter content, but I think for a cell format that’s ment to be used for longer texts, this behaviour increases the of involuntary data loss. I think the AirTable approach of appending the text you start writing is the right solution.
  2. If i select some text through the means of holding down my mouse and draging, and then releases the mouse outside of the text editor, the editor is collapsed.
  3. This might only occur on a Mac. If I type something that is replaced by the OS’s text replacement system and then hit space, the space is lost and I need to type it again.
  4. There’s no way of inserting a line break that does not break the paragraph. So if you for example would like to quote a poem och some part of a Shakespeare play, every line would end up in a separate paragraph. Those kind of non breaking line breaks are available almost everywhere (in html the markup is
    , in markdown you type two spaces in the end of the preceding line, in Microsoft Word you hold down shift while hitting return, etc.) and I think the should be available in SeaTable as well.
  5. In the Keyboard shortcuts popup it says that command ⌘S will ”Save file”, and that ⌘V will ”Paste screen shot”!
  6. It would be really nice to edit long texts directly in the record details popup.

My suggestion is to do one of the following things:

  1. Skip the formatting of the long text column. You will be able to type markdown markup in a regular text field as well, just not have it previewed.
  2. Offer a third text column type, for plain text that supports multiple lines.

The idea of having formatted text in a field is cool, but with all of the bugs there are right now, just a plain text field that works as well as the single line text field, would be so much better!

Could you elaborate on your number 6:

Absolutely. When you are in a table view and press the round button with the expand arrows next to the line number, you get a detailed view of the row. If I want to edit a long text field from that view, I first have to click on the text to open it in the editing view, before I can start edit. Compare this to the single text field in SeaTable, or the long text field in AirTable, where I can edit the text directly from the detailed view.

One more thing. The heading of the long text editing view is the name of the column, as opposed to the name of the row, which is the case for the detailed row view. This makes it hard to see what row I am editing. Yes, I can see which line is slightly darker in the background, but the contrast to the other lines is really small, and the editing view sometimes covers the first column of the table.

Thanks for the detailed feedbacks on the long text field. We will give them a check in the next week.

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Hi again!

I noticed even one more thing. Editing text by dragging selected text with the mouse doesn’t work.

And an update on point three of the first post. I realised now that the space is inserted, but for some reason the text insertion point is placed before the space instead of after it.

And one more bug: Pressing command backspace on a mac should delete all text left of the insertion point on the current line, but not touch the line above even if the line break is a soft one, caused by text wrapping. In the long text editor it removes the whole paragraph, even if it is wrapped.

I like that! Good feedback.

When playing around with the editor, I spotted this issue:

Quick update: We plan on making updates to the long text column in SeaTable v.4.4

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