Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

I'm hoping adding categories could be improved in VisualEditor. Sometimes I copy and paste categories from somewhere else. I can't edit the name categories in VE though. eg. I paste "Australian companies established in 1997" and want to just change the year.

Secondly, I hoping the category search could be better. Right now I have to be very precise with what I type (different behaviour from adding a link to a article). I can't just type "Australian established 1997", I would have to type "Australian companies established in 199" to get a matching suggestion.

> I paste "Australian companies established in 1997" and want to just change the year.

I don't understand.. why can't you edit that ? There is no cursor in the text input to do so ?

> I have to be very precise This is going to be a problem even with search. There are a LOT of categories, so even with search it is very likely you are going to get a lot of noise in your search results. It should be possible however to allow for at least typos, if VE would use prefix search instead of title prefix matching. I have filed a ticket for that in phab:T359302.

I've also been thinking that one of the problems with adding categories, is that you can not choose a higher or lower level categories from a match. It might be a good idea if you could navigate the tree from the Category input field.

Thanks for creating that ticket.

Regarding the first point... actually the scenario where I encountered that issue was I copied the source of one article to use as a starting point for another article. But when I switch to VE, I can't edit the categories.

The point I was trying to make was once a category is entered, it cannot be edited in VE. It would be great if they were editable.

You can edit the categories in VE by going to the drop down menu at the top right (three horizontal lines) and choosing: Categories. Or simply by clicking the previewed categories. You can then remove incorrect categories and add new ones.

Thinking about it again, I suspect that your problem is that when you are in the categories dialog, you don't want to have to type out from scratch the category name that you want ? This is why you speak of modifying (technically, there is no such thing, each category spelling exists and each of them is a valid category). I guess this would be helped if you could at least copy the text of the 'wrong' category name, but this is currently not possible in the dialog.

Yeah, I was talking about the categories dialog and editing each individual category. It isn't very flexible at the moment. :/

I agree. I find it easier to switch into source mode to edit categories than to do it in VE. Or use HotCat and don't bother with any editor. When you are in the category-edit pop-up in VE, you see a category name with a down arrow to the right which currently takes you a popup with a textbox for the sort key. What if it took you to a popup with two textboxes, one with the category name as editable text and the other as the sortkey? That might be a solution for the VE users.