Hello everyone,
As a Roblox UI designer, I use text elements quite a lot in my work, but I’ve always found editing text in a TextLabel, TextButton, or TextBox very annoying since everything’s in one line. And when I’m typing out several sentences to display, it’s very difficult to go back and edit any mistakes.
This is the current state:
Additionally, another problem I see with text elements in Roblox Studio is formatting individual bits of it. I’m pretty sure it’s not possible (correct me if I’m wrong) where sections of a text can be a different color, can be bolded, italicized, underlined and have a strikethrough (the last two don’t exist at all). I actually made a feature request before about adding in individual properties for basic text formatting.
Edit: RichText [TextScaled Support Added] is finally out! The Gods have listened!
Feature
The one solution to both of these issues is adding in a resizable window (a pop-up window when you click on the text property) that is large enough to view at least a couple of paragraphs. It should also have buttons to format highlighted text accordingly (with their associated key binds, of course). Virtually every program that supports text elements has it set up like this, Roblox Studio is one of the very few exceptions where the text property is embedded with less important properties. I believe that this should change for the convenience of UI designers and other developers.
Example of the feature (from Krita):
Krita has an option to bold, italicize, underline, align text as well as change the font, its color, and its size.
An alternative can be just having a menu over the text being edited (from GIMP):
GIMP has an option to change the font, bold, italicize, underline, or strikethrough text as well as font size and color.
What I’m requesting is a window (like the screenshot in Krita) or a menu (like the screenshot in GIMP) where we can see the entire text with the options mentioned in the captions above. Several properties, such as Size, Font, TextColor3, StrokeColor3, and more, will need to be moved to this window so all the options are in front of us like a color palette.
Use Cases
Although it’s hard to list use cases for this, there is one significant one that broadly applies to most cases:
Editing sentences / paragraphs
Right now, the text goes off-screen even with only several characters (which is very annoying). If we’re writing just a single sentence and want to go back to fix our little typo, we would have to use the arrow keys or enlarge the properties window (which is only to some extent). It would be so much easier to have a window where we can pinpoint the mistake in the text editor, immediately place our cursor there, and fix the mistake.
If this feature is added, it would improve my development experience because I can easily edit text without having my workflow disturbed, or slowed down. Every type of developer (UI designer, scripter, builder, animator, etc.) value their time greatly, and this feature will definitely support that principle. Roblox is recently pushing out updates to increase developer convenience, such as the Object Insertion Workflow, so the text editor window should also be a top priority. I believe that the basics should not be overlooked or forgotten, but there are several areas on Roblox where this does happen. The addition of this window in Studio will prove to be a significant step in the modern direction that Roblox is currently heading.
Thank you for taking my request into consideration,
and have a great time!