1796776 - Undo in textarea or input type=text captures too much (mostly all text entered)

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: DOM: Editor, enhancement)

Description

[Benjamin Bach]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:106.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/106.0

Steps to reproduce:

I'm going to file this as a bug report. It may well be argued that the current "undo/redo" implementation does what it's supposed to, but I'm not familiar with a reference as to why the current behavior is nice, nor an enhancement proposal to improve it.

• Type in a lot of text in a textfield and press CTRL+Z (undo)

Actual results:

• When pressing CTRL+z in a textarea, notice that all the entered text disappears (are there exceptions to this?)

Exceptions to "undo=remove all":

• If you move around the blinking cursor while typing, you can observe that undo segments into two "groups" or undoable events.

Expected results:

• A single character or word disappears. Holding down CTRL+Z can undo several smaller events in sequence and CTRL+SHIFT+Z can redo them.

You can also observe how Chrome works - it segments undoable actions by roughly each word entered.

I'm on Ubuntu, not sure if implementation for Windows or Mac is different. I also observe that undo functions on top of JavaScript-based richtext fields are buggy: Because of the huge undo history in Firefox, redoing easily becomes impossible and entire text segments can get lost (when your text authoring method is to undo, copy and redo).