Thread:VisualEditor/Feedback/Special characters/reply (6)

Thanks.

"I NEVER use the Special characters drop down in WikiEditor."

We've heard that from a number of people, which confirms our suspicions that EditTools (which was meant to be switched off when the WikiEditor special character inserter was rolled out, but never got axed) serves the needs of most users, particularly in terms of quick-and-easy UX.

"(I think we should do some analytics gathering on that usage there btw)"

Hmm, yeah; patches welcome. ;-)

"Since Mac OS 10.9 I use the OS version, because: It has a helpful keyboard shortcut that works OS wide now. Very nice categories, search and variants. … Ideally, it should have like 6 categories of chars that you might often use on that wiki and ability to lookup and add other categories to your profile. … Per category I would expect max 25 chars, multiline"

Mac OS X's native character inserter has 11 top-level categories, and yet misses a bunch of characters insertable in WikiEditor – IPA, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, … – and the "arrows" category has (at rough count) 300 characters alone. I don't think we'd want all of these, but drawing the line at 25 might be hard. :-) There are 20 variants of "A" in the Latin group, and another 27 of "A" in the Latin extended group, for example.

"I would expect a fixed positioned footer (in view, consistently accessible, but out of the way) or a dock able floating panel or something the like. I would expect it to be available until dismissed. Auto disappearing is nice in theory, but dismissing after 2 secs is too quick for multiple actions and dismissing after 10 secs would probably be too 'unexpected' for users."

Perhaps a pop-out panel that disappears on each use, or can dock down to the bottom of the page to be persistent?