UNDO in notes on a Mac appears to function as DELETE

jwood

I've noticed this many times before, but this go round I managed to fully delete the content of a note I was working on. There wasn't that much content that having to rewrite it from scratch is catastrophic, but it's not all that cool either.

It seems that in the note editor (TinyMCE) on OS X, ⌘Z somewhat functions as the regular undo, but there's no redo if you undo-just-typed-text: the function just doesn't work. Worse, hitting undo again (hoping to, well, undo what you undone) seems to have the rather nasty effect of deleting text backward from the current cursor position to the start of that line. And I even managed to make it delete 2 whole paragraphs, headings and all. Frustratingly, because I had auto synchronisation on, I couldn't get to the previous version of the note online quickly enough to copy the text; my change/deletion beat me to it.

I suspect this is a glitch caused by running Firefox (+ TinyMCE) on OS X — ie, not Zotero's fault at all — but one to look out for anyway. Traps for young players I guess.

MG6

I had a similar issue today, many many months later but also on a Mac. I was working in a note and hit undo one too many times by accident. Taking things a step beyond the above, this somehow replaced the entire contents with those of a different note I had been working on earlier--and which I had not copied to the clipboard. As the man says, there is no way to redo, and I lost quite a bit of work. I didn't see any error, so I couldn't report it as such. 3.0b3, Firefox 10.0.
Is there either a fix to stop undo from going quite so far, or a best practice to avoid such mistakes (other than never making a mistake)?
Thank you

moreno

just happened to me too (and i'm on a pc, standalone version 3.0.3).

i was writing on a note and comparing the data with the content of another note when I hit the undo button twice and *voilà*, like mg6, one of them completely replaced the other. no can redo.

i've been working with the autosync turned off, so i was able to go online and retrieve what i had already written and saved. because i've been using the sync button as a save button... maybe that's one way to deal with that before future fixes...

dstillman

I've fixed the 3.0 branch so that the undo history is cleared when switching between notes—this used to be the case, but apparently hasn't been for a few years.

Cmd-Y will trigger Redo in TinyMCE on a Mac. This is non-standard (on a Mac—I think that's the standard Windows shortcut), but we of course use Cmd-Shift-Z to open the Zotero pane. We might be able to have Cmd-Shift-Z trigger Redo in Standalone, where the pane shortcut isn't used.

We could also have Cmd-Shift-Z trigger Redo in Firefox when a note has focus, but I think that would be frustrating for people who want to take a note and quickly close the Zotero pane.

jwood

Thanks Dan, duly noted!

MG6

Yes, thank you. Cmd-Y is a Mac shortcut in Office, too, so many people would likely find it natural enough. I would. Ctrl-Y is the PC equivalent, and there are a lot of switchers.