Deleting inside bullet lists sometimes duplicates text

Help / Discuss
#1

Hello,

I have a strange issue and phenomenon that I have witnessed multiple times over the last few Version (15.8, 15.9 and now also 15.10).
When working in bullet lists with WYSIWYG Editor in in-place-mode sometimes deleting text with backspace inserts/duplicates some text that is standing before the cursor instead of deleting the character before the cursor. Each time pressing Backspace inserts another block of the text. The only way “out” is pressing Strg+Z (undo) an after that everything behaves normally again.

This is occurring very rarely and sadly I have not found a pattern how to reproduce it yet.
I have only witnessed it when editing inside of bullet lists yet. The issue occurred on Safari for iPad and Windows Edge (Chromium). We only use the WYSIWYG in Place editing, so I can’t tell if it is happening in standalone WYSIWYG too.

Does somebody has witnessed this issue too? Or does somebody have an clue how to better systematically test it for reproducing the issue? Or is this maybe an known bug of CKEditor?

#2

Hi, maybe it’s Loading... . There’s also Loading... that could be related, but I can’t find anything else.

Hope this helps,
Marius

#3

Today by coincidence I was by able to reproduce and I even was able to start a screen recording of it:
BUG-Backspace2.mp4 - Up1 (xwikisas.com)
First I was using backspace which will duplicate stuff, then I was pressing the Delete-Key which behaves normally.

I did however not check the F12 browser dev console during the issue.

We did not install a Grammarly extension, I can’t even find it in the Extension Manager so unless its already included in CKE or XWIKI of these 15.X Versions it seem to be unrelated to it. Apparently it is also occurring without Grammarly - at least a comment from this year in Jira indicates that.

Edit: I just found out Grammarly is Apperently a chrome extension - we do not use that as we prevent users from installing extensions in our organisation.

Edit2: I just was able to reproduce it again while having the console open, there were no entries in the console.

#4

Would be great if you can try to reproduce on the standard CKEdior 4 demo here CKEditor 4 Demo - WYSIWYG HTML Editor .

Thanks,
Marius

#5

I can’t reproduce it in the Official CKEditor 4 Demo, but as I still have no clue how to reliable reproduce it. So I can’t tell with certainty if that means that the issue is not with CKEditor 4 itself.

But also I suspect a part of CKE4 of the origin of the bug:

When you have an list (no matter if bullet or numbered list!) in CKE4 (demo as well as XWIKI) and click way behind a line that has an sub-list element, normally in every program the cursor lands at the end of that line. In CKE4 however it lands in the front of that list entry - which is strange.
This might be an very important aspect, as the duplication bug also duplicates the text from the beginning of the list element if im observing correctly!

Wild theory:
To me it feels like CKE4 in XWIKI Editor is deleting the text of the list element every time you press backspace and inserting the same text that was before the cursor with one less character instantly after. And some times that mechanism is behaving wrongly.

But that wild theory aside, I cant tell if its an CKE4 or XWIKI implementation bug :frowning:

I can tell with certainty that its only occurring in lists (and not normal paragraphs) and also that the duplication of the text is like milliseconds AFTER the last character gets deleted (that can be observed in the screen-recording when playing close attention.)

#6

Please confirm that your ckeditor plugins directory location, check ckeditor5-metadata.json files are present and correctly named and check server logs for 404 errors. I hope these will be correct.

#7

? The issue is with CKE4 that xwiki brings and not with CKE5

My multiple installations on fresh servers that all had the issue (like the current one) are all with the DEB package, I did not modify any CKE editor files, also I have no clue where these are on the DEB package installations.

Therefore my theory that this bug must occur on other installations as well. (Unless it’s only occurring when setting the language to German)

Which log did you mean with search for 404 error? Catalina out?

#8

I have the same issue in the demo with Jetty Servlet Container: HSQLDBxwiki-platform-distribution-flavor-jetty-hsqldb-14.10.19.zip

#9

The issue is also occurring when using the delete key (trying to delete characters that were after the Cursor), I had a few occasions of the bug inside of bullet lists with the delete key, but as I use that less frequently I did not initially found that issue with it too.

But just a few moments ago, I was also able to reproduce the exact same issue inside a table while using the Delete Key! So it is not limited to Lists but maybe everything that is some kind of “element”?

I fear that this is no small bug and it extremely confuses users!

#10

I created an Jira bug report:
https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-21731

#11

Hi @TomTheWise

Thanks for reporting this - we share your sentiments as we’ve also noticed some glitches with the behaviour of the backspace and delete keys in WYSIWYG mode.

Some issues we’ve experienced:

  • Using backspace key within a table can end up deleting the previous row
  • Sometimes pressing backspace will duplicate the paragraph text (this has been reported CKEDITOR-493 but is currently unresolved)

It gets pretty frustrating for our users. I’m not sure if this can be solved by XWiki making improvements to their WYSIWYG editor or if it’s an unfortunate reality of using CK Editor 4. I see there are a number of related issues reported on the CK4 GitHub…

#12

Hello,
thank you very much for confirming this! This bug is the most mind-robbing one in XWiki for me and it always baffled me, how others are not experiencing that.

CKEDITOR-493 however seems to be directly related to an specific browser Addon (Grammarly) which we definitely don’t use in our organisation with around ~500 users.

Currently I am working very much with tables, and alone in the last 2 hours I stumbled over this bug 5-6 times. It is extremely frustrating.

1 Like
#13

Facing the same issue. Fortunately, this can be undone immediately with Ctrl+Z.