Re: [Alphacocoa-devel] Alpha drag & drop

[Greg D. <gre...@in...>]

A quick update - I started seeing the behavior on one instance of Alpha this morning, so I experimented with a number of things to characterize its 
behavior.  What I found was that while in a freshly launched copy of the app, drag and drop behaved as expected, it's actually still working after the 
app has been open for 24 hours - but it now takes second and a half or so of holding the mouse button down before the arrow cursor appears and the 
text can be dragged.  Attempting to move the cursor within a second results in the selection being changed rather than dragging it.  It's possible 
that this was the case before, but I wasn't waiting long enough - I'm very used to Alpha being responsive during text edits and this is quite a bit 
longer than seems usual.  It's certainly longer than it was yesterday.

I have launched and quit numerous apps during the last day, but nothing appeared to happen to Alpha's behavior at the time of each action.

For comparison, I looked at my copies of LibreOffice and Pages, which change modes within a fraction of a second.  LibreOffice does not change the 
cursor till you start to drag, while Pages changes it before you move the cursor; but I'm not sure LibreOffice uses Cocoa text.  So for my next test 
I'm going to leave Pages open for a while and check its behavior frequently.  It's possible that something is globally affecting Cocoa text behavior 
when a document is left open for an extended period.  If it continues to affect only Alpha, I'll try deleting prefs and run the test again.

> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 22 May 2020 07:20:43 -0400
> From: Greg Dunn <gre...@in...>
> To: Bernard Desgraupes <bde...@or...>
> Cc: alp...@li...
> Subject: Re: [Alphacocoa-devel] Drag and drop - Alpha 9.1.1
> Message-ID: <fe6...@in...>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
> 
> As always, your work on Alpha is appreciated!  I will keep in mind that D&D is not fully under Alpha's control as I continue to look for clues.  I
> have instances running on 3 machines at this time and hope to find a link to the misbehavior somewhere.  So far, I've been checking after
> launching/quitting each of my regular applications that Alpha has or has not changed its behavior.  Hopefully I can isolate and - better yet -
> reproduce this quirk in a manner that allows it to be identified and squashed.  Even if it's just by changing something on my machine!
> 
> On 5/22/20 5:53 AM, Bernard Desgraupes wrote:
>> Hi Greg,
>>
>> thank you for this additional input. Drag and Drop is not implemented by Alpha itself but is provided for free by the Cocoa Text view. It?s hard to guess what they are doing under the hood. But clearly there is a wrong interaction at some point. Indeed if something is consistently reproducible, it will give us a clue.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Bernard
>>
>>> Le 21 mai 2020 ? 20:11, Greg Dunn <gre...@in...> a ?crit :
>>>
>>> Just a follow-up - not expecting any action on it, but I wanted to report that this drag and drop failure seems to be very repeatable after Alpha has been running for a number of consecutive days.  Restarting Alpha seems to fix it every time.  A sign of the issue is that the cursor remains an I-beam instead of changing to the arrow, after the mouse button has been depressed and held.  I have not been able to find a workaround other than restarting the application.  My second machine has a new instance of Alpha which was restarted at the same time, as a control.  We'll see if it exhibits this behavior, and when.
>>>
>>> Interestingly, and even on a fresh restart of Alpha, I will frequently get a file where the cursor remains as an arrow and cannot be changed to the I-beam even after clicking multiple locations in the text.  Double-clicking a word or dragging to highlight it and then clicking in the word restores the I-beam cursor; clicking outside the selected word or text grouping does not restore the I-beam.  Drag and drop works properly both before and after the cursor changes shape.  Notably, switching to another app and then back to Alpha causes the misbehavior to return - this is repeatable. Since the block of text becomes (or should be) draggable after selecting and a cursor change is involved in both cases, I have a suspicion that there is some kind of correlation here; I have not seen both behaviors at the same time.  If I find other seemingly related issues I will try to document them.
>>>
>>> I need to track these items daily under consistent conditions to see if anything occurs (like perhaps the launch of another application) which causes the failure to follow.  The last time I did this, it worked for a considerable time and then I forgot to check daily - when of course it began to act up.  Sigh.  Closing all windows and creating new ones doesn't fix the issue, so it appears to be something in Alpha's application memory region and not in the file's buffer.  I will be a little more thorough and try to pin it down more closely this time.
> 
> 


-- 
| Greg Dunn                       | Trust yourself; trust Ivanova.   |
| gre...@in...               | Anybody else... shoot 'em.       |
| The Sultan of Slack(tm)         |                 Susan Ivanova    |
| http://www.indy.net/~gregdunn/  |                                  |