1

When asking a question, or providing an answer, there's an "Undo" option, also accessible by Ctrl+Z.

However, when writing a comment no such option or keystroke is provided.

I can accept that many of the fancy options provided for Q&A are less appropriate for a simple comment, but an "Undo" is such a basic feature that I feel is should be supported. In fact, I fell foul of its absence just today when an accidental keystroke somehow cleared the whole of my comment field.

[Update added 2013-02-02]

Having been informed that this should be supported, I can confirm that Ctrl+Z does not work for Comments in IE8 on XP SP3, although it does in Firefox on the same O/S.

  • I think this is a feature request, not a bug report. :P And yes, this would be helpful. – American Luke Feb 1 '13 at 23:00
  • @Luke, See comment in response to Shog9 below – ACProctor Feb 2 '13 at 11:47
  • Pretty sure that's a browser interface thing – American Luke Feb 2 '13 at 15:11
  • meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56161/… suggests IE8 is in a gray area between supported and unsupported. But I'm not in any position to be definitive on this. – user104 Feb 2 '13 at 15:44
  • @ColeValleyGirl. I appreciate this but IE8 is the highest version acceptable on XP. Many business refuse to budge from XP (understably IMHO), and my last contract required me to have XP. If SE is incompatible with IE8 then there needs to be a notice about functionality being limited, similar to the one Google displays. – ACProctor Feb 2 '13 at 16:02
  • I was just providing you with a data point that you might not be aware of, not taking any particular stance. – user104 Feb 2 '13 at 16:03
4

Undo already works in comment fields. On Windows (at least, in Firefox and Chrome), you can trigger it with the same Ctrl+Z keystroke combination that's common to just about every other text-entry field on that platform.

There's no visual indication of this, since there's no toolbar for comments - it's a fairly light-weight editor (particularly in comparison to the one used for questions and answers) and is expected to work just as any normal text-entry field would in a browser (so, for instance, you may have different features and means of accessing them depending on the browser and platform you happen to be using).

There are a couple of small exceptions to this: the Enter key automatically posts the comment being edited, and there's tab-completion when you start writing someone's name as part of an @-reply. But beyond those customizations, you can pretty much just treat it as you would any text field.

Update: since you're using IE8, this appears to be an instance of this bug: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8849864/html-text-input-undo-not-working

  • it definitely doesn't work here. If you're saying this feature should work then this is certainly a bug report rather than a feature enhancement. The system I'm using is IE8 on Windows XP SP3. – ACProctor Feb 2 '13 at 11:49
  • 1
    Ok - this appears to be an Internet Explorer thing; for some reason, it disables Undo in certain scenarios when it probably should not. – Shog9 Feb 2 '13 at 17:07
  • Thanks @Shog9. Do you know if the site is at fault, or whether IE has a bug? – ACProctor Feb 2 '13 at 17:11
  • Considering it works just fine in Firefox and Chrome, I consider this an IE bug - we're certainly not doing anything particularly odd with these text fields. It might be possible to work around, but I'm not sure what that would require. – Shog9 Feb 2 '13 at 17:21

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