Scroll long text input fields with mouse wheel

[wayfaringrob]

Add the ability to quickly scroll a horizontal text field with horizontal and/or vertical scrolling. Right now the only option is to use the arrow keys or home/end keys, which doesn't work if you have a selection on the text as it will deselect it.

[Anonymous User]

Agree! One of the little things in Pro that drive me batty everyday. 🙂

[wayfaringrob]

@Anonymous User  yep, especially now that they're moving in the direction of just having one field with the entire path including the filename rather than separate fields for container and item.

[JonathanNeal]

@wayfaringrob  Can you confirm your workflow?
1. Click mouse on a output path

2. Select some text within the edit

3. Desired to be able to scroll your mouse within the text box and it will scroll left or right.

Our developer said this one is a big ask, so if it is desired will need some kudos.
Are you typically just trying to copy the workspace?  If so, would you rather have a copy workspace button? (Easier to make).

[wayfaringrob]

@JonathanNeal  Yes, a workflow like that. The scrolling would ideally also work if no text is selected but the mouse is over it or cursor is inside (that's how Firefox's address bar behaves, and it's quite nice).

No, not trying to copy, just read and edit the text since it's typically a very long string in a narrow little box. Unless you're storing all your data at the root level of your drive, you've probably got quite a bit of nested folders to scroll through, plus however long the default name is. For example, if I don't like the default output name that Pro picked, it can be very hard to find where the path ends and the filename starts -- why Esri is merging these two formerly separate boxes into one across their tools, I do not know, but it's a step in the wrong direction IMO. You can expand the pane temporarily I guess, but that's an extra couple steps. It would be a nice touch that I find useful in other applications.

[JonathanNeal]

@wayfaringrob To see the full path if you hover over the Edit box, a popup with the full path will appear?  Maybe this is enough?

Lots of details, that I hope will help give understanding.  (Please add Kudos if you still want this feature though)

Asside for two fields into one topic (Great question we debated on it within our team for some time.):
Reason for adding it to a single path was that we can enforce data types within validation.  Strings are nice for flexibility, but for tables in a database that start with a number or other characters it is a hole that we fail upon tool execution.  We can fail before tool execution.  Also, with valid data types we can chain tools together using ModelBuilder.  This also brings consistancy between many tool interfaces.

Asside for autogenerated output names:
One of out focuses to to increase productivity.  So when we generate paths or outputs we expect them to be (most of the time) helpful.  In our discussion we decided for them and wanted them to be easily editable.  So the following is what we have:
1. When you click the edit it is expected to put your cursor to the location of the name you clicked
2. Output paths show the name only instead of a long path.
3. Hover over the output will show the full path text.

For why this will need kudos is that autogenerated names (1) and (2) are complicated to implement.  So adding horizontal scroll to it may be a large task because it is implemented many different places in our code.  Namely multi-value output would provide both a vertical scroll and (if this is a feature) a horizontal scroll.

[wayfaringrob]

One alternate solution that might address some of the same pain points would be to do something like this. Finder on the Mac expands a file name to multiple lines when renaming if the window isn't wide enough to show the whole thing.

[wayfaringrob]

@JonathanNeal  revisiting this. Now that I am teaching I am actually hearing a lot of confusion from students on this merged box situation. It is not immediately intuitive nor convenient - you click once in the box that looks like it just has a file name or a gdb and all of a sudden there's more text, your cursor is somewhere else, and if you were trying to select text, you've now selected the wrong text because the whole thing moved on you. Having separate boxes with no surprises would really help everybody.

If there really is no other way to maintain the two-box setup, could the merged box at least be multi-line by default and never hide the full path? Plenty of vertical real estate in the GP pane