Enter and tab behaviour feedback

[karmatosed]

This is a very specific feedback from a user test sent in via the testing form, so thought worth issue:

"I find the "enter" and "tab" behavior to be absolutely maddening. I expect at the end of an unordered list that hitting enter twice will LEAVE the list and start a new paragraph, instead I'm trapped in a list.

I find it bizarre that tab doesn't indent things like it does in every other editor I can remember using. Don't me wrong, I LOVE keyboard shortcuts and tab between form fields regularly, but these aren't form fields these are full on WYSIWYG content blocks and I expect them to behave like Word, TextEdit, etc... all do when it comes to the keyboard.

I need keyboard shortcuts for formatting things, like turning 5 lines into an unordered list, or indenting/de-indenting some text.

I've tried HARD to write in this, but after a few paragraphs I'm at my wits end and go back to the old editor because this is just too slowly and awkward."

[swissspidy]

I find the "enter" and "tab" behavior to be absolutely maddening. I expect at the end of an unordered list that hitting enter twice will LEAVE the list and start a new paragraph, instead I'm trapped in a list.

See #1482.

Tab for indentation definitely makes sense to me.

[jwold]

That's some great feedback.

When I'm going longform on article writing I use shortcuts common to many editors, or write in markdown.

A few shortcuts I use very regularly:

• Unordered/ordered lists
• Heading sizes
• Bold, italics, strike, underline
• Code

[afercia]

Tab for indentation definitely makes sense to me.

Beware of keyboard traps 🙂

[afercia]

I find it bizarre that tab doesn't indent things like it does in every other editor I can remember using.

Just wanted to add that this is not how HTML works 🙂 Users sometimes get confused by what desktop editors (Word) do and they expect that works also in HTML.
Instead, in HTML multiple spaces and tabs get converted to a single space. It's a SGML thing and there's nothing we can do about that.
Even when there's a "visual" indentation, for example with unordered/ordered lists, that's not a tab character and it's usually rendered with some padding or margin.

Only in preformatted text the tab characters are respected, or when using the related CSS properties.

[karmatosed]

Closing as moving to the project. We are moving things to projects that aren't core Gutenberg and need to be done apart.