Outstanding bugs with tags: display, keyboard-friendliness and auto-completion

semblance

While some of the earlier tag-related bugs that were introduced in 1Password 4 have now been fixed, there are still several outstanding issues in 1Password 5.0.2.

First, a long tag list in an item STILL extends off the right-hand edge of the window without wrapping round. That means you have to make the entire 1Password window much wider to see all the tags. For some items, I can't see all the tags even in full screen mode.

Second, it's not possible to enter a series of tags using the keyboard only. In 1Password 3 you could type a tag name, press Enter to turn it into an actual tag, then type the next tag name, and so on. But in 1Password 4 and 5, each time you press Enter, a tag is created but the text field loses focus. This means you cannot start typing your next tag until you re-establish focus by clicking in the tags field. This has to be done after each tag, so if you're entering say 10 tags, you have to switch between keyboard and mouse 10 times — which is painful.

Third, tag auto-completion is still broken. To reproduce the issue, lets say you have a set of tags like this:

• has-address-current
• has-address-previous
• has-name
• has-phone-mobile
• has-phone-landline

If you start typing the first 3 characters "has", everything looks good: a drop-down list of matching tags appears, and the actual text in the text box automatically extends to match the first tag as a suggestion — in this case "has-address-current". The suggested additional text which you didn't type, "-address-current" is selected. This is great, because you can then choose to either accept the suggestion by pressing Enter, choose a different suggestion by pressing Down or Up and then Enter, or by clicking on a suggestion, or you can ignore the suggestion by continuing to type — which overwrites the suggestion, because it's selected. Perfect.

However as soon as you type one more character "-", all that good behaviour goes out the window!

Instead of continuing in that way, what happens is this:

1. If te overall text you've typed is "has-", then the text auto-completes with the first tag as a suggestion, but adds a stray "-" on the end, so the text becomes "has-address-current-". Furthermore the suggested additional text is NOT selected —which means that if you simply keep typing then your subsequent text appears after the unwanted suggestion. For example, if the overall text you type from the start is say, "has-name", then what appears on the screen is "has-address-current-name". This is both non-existent and not intended; autocomplete has erroneously inserted unwanted text between "has-" and "name".

2. If you delete the unwanted auto-completion and get the text back to "has-", then auto-completion goes off in a huff, and stops making any suggestions at all. Even though what you've typed ("has-") matches 5 tags, no auto-complete suggestions appear. This means you have to finish typing the entire name of the desired tag from memory, without the aid of auto-suggestion.

I think auto-complete suggestions via a drop-down list is great — but the suggestions should only get used if you explicitly select one, either by pressing Enter (or Up and Down followed by Enter), or by clicking on one. If you don't explicitly select one, then what you type is what you type; auto-complete should not corrupt it. And auto-complete should keep giving you options right up to the end, as long as what you've typed matches at an existing tag.

sjk

Hi @semblance,

Thanks for your thoroughly detailed report of these three issues (display, keyboard-friendliness and auto-completion) with tags. That third one is a real doozy! :)

All three are in our bug tracker and I've included all your comments there.

ref: OPM-727, OPM-726, OPM-763

semblance

Awesome, thanks @sjk‌.

It's so refreshing when a company listens to its customers... while so many others torture their customers with first-line support desks whose main objective is to fob people off for as long as possible with canned and irrelevant suggestions! :D

rickfillion

Hi @semblance‌,

Wow, I wasn't aware about that third issue there. That certainly makes tags with "-" in their names significantly less fun to use.

As for the issue where you can't enter multiple tags without leaving the field.... you can do this by using the "," between tags. As soon as you hit "," it should take the previous text and create a tag out of it, letting you start a new tag.

I hope this helps

Rick

semblance

Hi @rickfillion‌, thanks for the tip about pressing comma between tags. This means you can drive the tag entering process with the keyboard only, which is a big improvement.

Interestingly, the comma key works the way you described both for text you've typed, and for a text you've selected (using the Up / Down keys) from the drop-down list.

However, it would still be nice if the pressing Enter behaved the same way though —selecting an item from a drop-down list by pressing "," seems a bit weird and counter-intuitive.

You can of course select the item by pressing Enter, and then turn it into a tag by pressing "," — but that's two key presses where one should do.

rickfillion

Hi @semblance,

I agree that this could be a smoother process. I hope we can do better in a future release. :smile:

Rick

Rourke

I'd like to add in my support for some fixes to the tag autocomplete feature. I use hyphens in my tags, but the same thing happens with spaces and underscores as well; All of those keys auto-fill the selected entry from the suggestion list. If you have multiple tags with a common prefix (e.g. has-*) it's a fairly substantial speed bump in the tagging workflow. Suggestion lists are traditionally passive, requiring direct action (e.g. [tab] or [carriage return]) to invoke; It feels bizarre to have one that is so forceful with its suggestions.

I found a related thread but neither one seems to be established as the canonical issue. The other one is titled REQ: Better handling of tags with spaces

Megan

Hi @Rourke,

Your feedback has been passed along. :)

littlebobbytables

Hi @Rourke

I've added your voice to the ticket. Fingers crossed we can get this resolved.