Hi, I’m a new Scrivener user, formerly MS Word. When I’m in a document and I hit escape for any reason (often because I’m trying to get out of the Find function) it brings up a seemingly irrelevant list of words and changes the word next to my cursor to something completely unrelated. This is not only annoying, but dangerous, as it’s changing text and I don’t always remember what it was originally. Is there any way I can turn off this functionality?? And what in the world is it there for?
Tell me about it, it’s one of my least favourite changes with OS X 10.10. You’re looking at the word completion list, which will attempt to “complete” even whole sections of text with basic words, or even when nothing at all has been typed into the editor. More annoying is that if you hit Esc, it doesn’t cancel itself properly if you hit Esc again, it just insert a word and leaves it up to you to delete it, and changes words on the fly rather than waiting for you to actually select a word from the list and hit a key to confirm. As you’ve probably gathered, this isn’t something Scrivener does, it will happen in TextEdit and probably most other applications on your system that use the standard Mac coding environment to provide text editing. I know of no way to disable it.
It is at least an action that is inserted into the undo stack, so even if you accidentally blow away an entire scene with the word “And”, you can just hit Cmd-Z.
This thread seems to indicate that it’s been around longer than 10.10, and that it’s a behavior of the underlying NSTextView object that applications can override, including which key activates it.
I think the main things that have changed, that make it feel more intrusive in 10.10 are:
You can press Esc with no word already started, and when doing so, Esc doesn’t cancel your mistake. You are left with a stray “I” (or whatever) in the text for some reason. I just discovered you can press the Delete key, but that’s awkward, Esc has cancelled since forever—and it’s not even consistent since if you type in ‘tha’ and press Esc, you get ‘that’, press Esc again and you go back to where you started, ‘tha’. That feels like a bug to me. It might seem minor, but consider how easy and habitual it might be hit Esc and that one might not notice what happened, meaning their files become littered with stray suggestion induced typos.
Select a paragraph of text, or even just two words, and hit Esc. What? Who at Apple though that was an appropriate response? It’s panic inducing and dangerous. Even if Cmd-Z can undo it, there is absolutely no reason to risk the user’s data like that for something that makes no sense to do anyway.
As for disabling it, I’m not sure if that is possible with disabling core Scrivener completion features that aren’t so intrusive, such as name and location suggestions in scriptwriting, title completions and project auto-completes.
Don’t have a Mac with me, so I can’t test this, but would assigning the esc key to a specific Scrivener function via System Preferences (something benign, such as “save”) override the current QuickType setting?
Unfortunately, not. It’s also not clear why Esc triggers the behaviour as the actual shortcut key according to the OS X Help files and the menus is alt-Esc (which wouldn’t be a problem).
I come across this most often when reading in PDFs in Preview: tap Escape and Preview decides I’m wanting to enter a comment and inserts one for me. Enforced, and repeated, Cmd Z-ing to remove something you didn’t want by pressing a key that has never before created text (and has no logical reason for doing so now) is, to say the least, irritating.
Generally, I get used to Apple’s decisions and often come round to agreeing they were a good idea. Not this. It is stupid, irritating, frustrating, pointless and without logic.
EDIT: …and not fixed in El Capitan. I wish I could see the logic of the Escape key entering text, maybe then it wouldn’t bother me so much.
