Keyboard Watcher misbehaving

[dbini]

When I try to select the input key for the Keyboard Watcher, sometimes I have problems: (Izzy 2.6.1 on OSX 10.13.3)

Using the slider, dragging up towards the top of the slider, Isadora hangs with a spinny beachball and I need to force quit.

then, after re-opening Isadora (without re-booting the Mac) I cannot find the usual first range of characters, even if i click and drag in the input box.

anybody else have this problem since the shift to UTF-8 ? 

[mark]

@dbini

Well, the slider was never very meaningful when there were 256 x 256 combinations = 65536. Now, it's 4294967296 combinaton more because of the Unicode support.

I guess this wasn't heavily tested because most people probably just type the character they need.

That said, please file a ticket so we can reproduce the problem and fix it.

But probably we need to implement a special case here... I mean, should we just offer the regular ASCII characters on the slider to make it more manageable? Do people have thoughts about this?

Best Wishes,
Mark

[DusX]

@mark

that seems like a resonable way of making the slider control useful.
The issue I see is in documenting this. The help would need updating, possibly including links to an Ascii chart, and definition of UTF-8

[mark]

@dusx said:

The issue I see is in documenting this.

 Well, if we just offer space (hex 32) through tilde (Hex 7F) then I don't know if we need a chart. People can just scroll through the letters. If we did what I proposed above, why would we need to get into UTF-8?

Best Wishes,
Mark

[DusX]

@mark

I was mostly thinking as a way to expand the users understanding. If the slider provides ascii chars, it may not be clear that they have the option for other uft-8 chars. 

They may not know the difference. Helping users understand the char sets may reduce confusion in the long term.

This is the sort of thing I can see adding to the help text once links can be included etc.