Snippets used online miss a letter occaisonally

Right, there's a known problem with lost key strokes when inserting word suggestions or snippets in Gtk2 applications, like Firefox and Thunderbird. I'm somewhat confident it can't happen in Gtk3 applications (gedit, nautilus, ...) as Onboard uses AT-SPI for those and doesn't actually generate key-strokes.

As you hinted, the only workaround I know of, is to slow down typing with a delay between key-strokes. However, from what I gather the likelihood for lost key-strokes is somehow system dependent, as it rarely happens for me, but quite frequently for Francesco. It turned out difficult to find a delay that doesn't inconvenience people who don't actually need it.

I wish we didn't have to, but I think adding some kind of typing delay to preferences may be necessary.

> BTW a way to use Snippets even more easily would be handy from
> a conventional keyboard
Hotkeys to access Onboard's features are probably not going to happen, for multiple reasons. We could expose snippets in the the D-Bus interface, though. Open a new bug report, please.

> or maybe more directly from the Onboard applet menu (Along with "Show/Hide Onboard, Preferences, Quit")
Possibly, open a separate bug report, please.

> Having Help via that menu would be nice.
Help for Onboard in general? One more bug report, please. I don't think there is one yet.

> Also with Ubuntu 12.04 I somehow had the applet mentu up there all the time. I have not figured out how to do that with Ubuntu 14.04.
I'm not sure what you mean, mind to elaborate?
Preferences->General->Show status icon toggles the indicator icon.

OK, I've added a delay setting to trunk. I'll ask Francesco for a snapshot of revision 1921. Once it's ready you can find it in our PPA at
https://launchpad.net/%7Eonboard/+archive/snapshots

Try it if you can. The new setting is Preferences->Keyboard->Advanced->"Delay between key-strokes".
The delay is off (0ms) by default. Try increasing it slowly until no more key-strokes are lost when you insert snippets, hopefully that will happen. Then please let me know what value you settled on.

I just uploaded revision 1822, which contains the fix, to our Snapshots PPA for trusty. It should be available as soon as launchpad has finished building it.

Francesco Fumanti <email address hidden> wrote:

>I just uploaded revision 1822, which contains the fix, to our Snapshots
>PPA for trusty. It should be available as soon as launchpad has finished
>building it.

On Wed, 12 Nov 2014, marmuta wrote:

> OK, I've added a delay setting to trunk. I'll ask Francesco for a
>snapshot of revision 1921. Once it's ready you can find it in our PPA
>at https://launchpad.net/%7Eonboard/+archive/snapshots
>
> Try it if you can. The new setting is
>Preferences->Keyboard->Advanced->"Delay between key-strokes".
> The delay is off (0ms) by default. Try increasing it slowly until no
>more key-strokes are lost when you insert snippets, hopefully that
>will happen. Then please let me know what value you settled on.

Thanks so much. I tried it.

Any delay helped significantly. I did see a few missed characters with
1 and 2. I dont think I saw any missing with 3. I think I'll set it
to 4. I dont think the delay will be a problem.

How I tested it: Eventually I made a snippet with 76 characters: 0-9
7.5 times followed by a space. The space caused both forms I tested on
to wrap so the ends of the long lines to line up when there were no
missing characters. Thus I could easily spot a line with a missing
character.

I also discovered that the "123" keyboard could be locked on like the
shift key. Thus I could test by just repeatedly clicking on the long
snippet. This allowed me to insert a snippet 30-50 times quite easily.
With a delay of 4 I could get "ahead" of the of the displayed
lines. After clicking many times as fast as I could, after I stopped,
lines would continue to be displayed for a while. But this is an
extreme use and not a problem the way I use it.

The computer I'm using has 3.4 GHZ INTEL CORE I5-4670K CPU

I will get to submiting seperate bug reports on the other issues.

> ** Changed in: onboard
> Status: Confirmed => Fix Committed

Sounds right to me.
Thanks again.

Fred

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Hi Fred,

The graphics card in your computer might also be of importance.

By the way, you asked for being able to access the snippets for example from the menu of the appindicator. Do you have a particular use case in mind? Normally, Onboard should be visible, when the focus is in a text element on the screen.

Cheers

Great, thanks for testing. 4 doesn't sound too bad. Francesco needed 30ms back then and it would still drop the occasional key-stroke.
I'd still like to wait for more bug reporters before increasing the default delay. There's been only you and Francesco so far and Francesco today doesn't need the delay anymore. He's upgraded hard- and software since, hard to tell what caused the change. Maybe Firefox improved in Vivid.