I Love Textboxes, You Love Textboxes: We Made Changes to 'Em

I could type out a super long introduction about how we envision the future of the universe, or I could just tell you that we silently shipped some :sparkler: INCREDIBLE :sparkler: changes to Textboxes.

You can now enjoy the following at your local Textbox:

  • Text Highlighting
    You could drag to select text, but we also realized it’s August and it would be criminal to make you sweat anymore than you already do. With your health in mind, you can also use Ctrl+A/Cmd+A to select all for the ultimate text highlighting experience.

  • Cut. Copy. Paste.
    After 9 years of intense user research (:sweat:) we decided, yes, it was time to allow you to cut, copy, and paste. :partying_face:

And now… a video for your enjoyment (or you could go insert a textbox inside of Studio and try it yourself you silly person)

Of course, the people who did the real work deserve all the credit. I just get paid to write these posts… Huge SHOUT OUT TO @smoothiecriminals and @Tiffblocks for making this work.

jingle bells, jingle bells…

349 Likes

I’m so glad this got included too. Terrific update all-around! now if only we could get access to the copy/paste API

38 Likes

This is great. Is there any chance of more shortcuts in the future?

9 Likes

How do we get the start and end of a selection? There only appears to be a SelectionStart property on the wiki.

9 Likes

Absolutely brilliant. Saw this in the API logs released by @Maximum_ADHD a month ago and have been waiting for quite a while now. Cheers!

Quick Question: Are we going to be getting shortcuts like Ctrl + Shift + Left_Arrow to capture the prior character and others?

10 Likes

We need to add more shortcuts. My promise to you is that I will be keeping this in mind as we push more features in the future.

19 Likes

You can also do CTRL+Backspace to delete an entire word, which I am a huge fan of. No more constant backspace clicking just to get rid of a word! Thank you for this amazing update!

7 Likes

My question is, what if this is used as a way to give out website links? Scam games could have a user copy and paste a link, which makes it much easier. Is there any way to prevent this?

If a developer used this to send players to links, would this be allowed?

I would like some clarification on what is being done in this case.

3 Likes

Are there plans to allow the developer to see what text a user has highlighted within a text box? Similar to CursorPosition, but a start and end point. This would allow the user to select text and then click a button, like the “bold” button does right here in Discourse. Edit: It exists!

Additionally, what about programmatically invoking a copy similar to the browser API? Imagine we want to allow the user to copy a code, it would be nice to let them just click one button instead of having to present a text box that they manually select and press ctrl-C.

16 Likes

I just tried this on my web browser and it selected all the text on there too; i never knew about this shortcut but it’ll prove useful on roblox and in general now that i know about it :yum:.

I just checked the studio shortcuts page, and this feature of ctrl+a is not documented there yet, maybe it should be updated to include it
image
https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/resources/studio/Studio-Shortcuts

5 Likes

I’m pretty sure there’s a filter on off-site links.

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Is this change only for Desktop or also for iOS and Android? Besides that this is a much needed change, this also allows me to make my own snippet editor inside of Roblox.

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What prevents the developer from setting the text of the text box to a offsite link? Then, the user can easily copy it.

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On iOS you get a textbox with the keyboard that pops up so you can cut, copy and paste as you would normally on an iOS device, can’t say the same for Android as I’ve never used it.

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Saw this being posted by @Maximum_ADHD on twitter.
Now I wonder if you can Hold Shift and use the Arrow Keys to select the text from the current cursor position.
Anything else this is beautiful! I love this! :heart:

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I don’t really understand what you have in mind on this one… I’m pretty sure that if you felt that a textbox’s fishy, you can easily report the game.

1 Like

We’ll need another 9 years. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

40 Likes

Oh wow. I had noticed some differences between Studio F9 console being select-able and the in game F9 console not. Also when I noticed in game chat being select-able I got really confused. Thanks for this!

Is this still happening? If so we may have accidentally re-written textboxes when making the Developer Console. (Oops!)

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TextBoxes have a CursorPosition property. As far as I can tell, the selection is in-between the cursor position and SelectionStart.

12 Likes