Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y are broken

[JohnWasilewski]

TextMaker Professional 2021 (rev S1016.0624) 64bit

I am finding that Undo and Redo, when operated using Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y respectively, are behaving very dangerous to use, for fear of losing a great deal of work. I haven't tried using the the toolbar icon versions or edit menu versions of these commands but I may do so next time.

What is happening with Ctrl-Z is as follows:
I press this key-combination to try to undo the last action. Nothing happens.
So I try it again. Nothing happens.
I repeat this a few times. Suddenly, TM undoes a large number of recent actions, wiping out a lot of work.

To get it back, I press Ctrl-Y. Nothing happens.
I repeat. Again nothing.
After a few retries, suddenly, a whole lot of previous work comes back, sometimes all of it, sometimes not all.

It is difficult to restore my work to just the state I want.
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John

[SuperTech]

I wasn't able to reproduce the issue. Would it be possible for you to post the files and also a step-by-step procedure to reproduce the problem or even an animated GIF recorded in screentogif (free at screentogif.com)?

If you want to send it to us privately, please send us an e-mail to forum[at]softmaker.de

Please also include the forum URL of this topic so that we can trace your e-mail.
https://forum.softmaker.com/viewtopic.php?f=389&t=20241

Thank you

[JohnWasilewski]

I'll try, but I am extremely busy just now and it might take me a while before I can provide what you ask.
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John

[SuperTech]

Please take your time and send them whenever you will free for that. Thanks for your time and efforts.

[JohnWasilewski]

Sorry I haven't had time yet to build a further report with sample document.
I will try to do so but I need to wait until it happens again, which might not be for a few days because I don't have any large documents in preparation at the moment.

It does not always happen. But it does seem to happen quite a lot.
It seems to happen especially when I am working with tables.

Could you experiment a bit more yourselves whilst waiting for more information from me?

NB I have just noticed another forum report about the same issue:
Please see https://bit.ly/38KQFVN
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John

[SuperTech]

Thanks for sharing the reference of other post of the same problem. I was unable to reproduce it but I have forwarded the details to our development team for further investigation of the problem.

[syahzuan]

I am using (rev S1016.0624) 64bit on Windows 10 and I confirm the same bug.
I moved from Microsoft to Softmaker and found this software couldn't even get undo function right for a text processor. What a shame.
It doesn't apply for a particular document, bug is there even for a new document.
I have also sent a support request.
Kindly fix this or offer a refund. Thank you.

Edit: Tried re-installation. Problem persists.
Tried installing 32-bit version. Problem persists.
Tried installing Softmaker Office 2018. Problem still persists.

[syahzuan]

I have recorded the problem in a video to demonstrate the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nn_Z_SkS6s
As shown in the video, I can go on and keep typing forever, and all the undo does is registering one single "typing" action.
Once you click undo or ctrl+z, you will lose a huge part, if not all of your document.
If I were to press tab, it does register "change indents" though.

Could you please flag it as urgent and high priority so that your developer team can look at this seriously. At this moment this software is completely unusable for me.

[SuperTech]

Thanks for sharing the screen recording video. I have checked it and this is not a bug because TextMaker does undo/redo in blocks of text as it considers that continues typing as one change, instead of a single line. You can see after clicking on undo, the redo button also activated.

I have already forwarded this suggestion also to our development team to change this from block undo/redo to line undo/redo.

[JohnWasilewski]

Re SINGLE and MULTIPLE actions

I accept and agree with the logic that continuous typing is treated as a SINGLE action.
I would expect any of the following actions to have interrupting the typing, however.
- by marking a character with the cursor and applying a superscript attribute,
- inserting a table;
- using the copy format function;
- indenting;
- changing the right margin;
- selecting a word and formatting it to italics;
- clicking the cursor somewhere in the current paragraph to insert or delete something;
- scrolling to and editing in another part of the document;
- and possibly pressing RETURN to end a paragraph.

That is to say,
1 the continuous typing preceding one of these actions,
2 then any one of the above actions (except that I'm unsure of the last one),
3 then more continuous typing after 2,
would constitute THREE separate actions.

Surely, please, this is how TextMaker is coded to behave, is it not?

When I first posted a report on this problem,
I was reporting that Ctrl-Z had been UNDOing multiple actions, not just single actions.
If all it had done was to undo the most recent unbroken string of continuous typing keystrokes, there is no way that I would have mistaken this for a fault. I don't now remember clearly what I have experienced but as best I can recall, my attempts at using Ctrl-Z caused TM to leap about, undoing many (perhaps 5 or 10) actions above and below the current-editing cursor position. I am therefore pretty certain that the problem remains as I have reported. It is also an intermittent problem, which seems not to occur all the time. As I have already reported, it seems more prevalent in lengthy, complex documents, with tables.

I thought at first it might be a problem of slow response, followed by a rush of executions of stored multiple Ctrl-Z attempts. I still think this is possible. Unlikely but possible. I'm unsure.

I have been a fairly advanced user of Wordprocessors for many years (Wordstar -> WordPerfect (aaaghh) ->M$Word -> TM2012 onwards and others), and I am certainly able to recognise when Ctrl-Z is misbehaving.

Please don't dismiss this problem based on your recent reply to Syahzuan's report and screen recording.
To Syahzuan: please try to produce a slightly more complex screen recording that does not use only the RTN keystroke as an actions delimeter.

The NEXT time that it happens to me, I will try my best to give you a good description of exactly what actions I lost.
This might not be for a while though because my work at the moment is mainly reading, now document preparation,
---
John

[SuperTech]

Thanks for your response but I never dismissed the original complaint, that also I reported to our development team but it's always difficult to troubleshoot the problems those we are unable to reproduce.

I tried several times to reproduce this problem with different operating systems but it never occurred. If possible for any user please provide a screen-recording of this problem with the document. That will be a great help in understanding this issue.

[JohnWasilewski]

I am getting very fed up with this bug.

I have just lost half a page of work that I had spent a lot of time thinking through and carefully preparing, which I had done, NOT IN a single stream of keyboard text-entry but by jumping about, adding something here, moving some words from this place to that, rearranging, jumping forward to add something them going back to enter something else, and so forth, all until I had it roughly how I wanted it.

I then made a potentially fatal mistake. I had made a small error - a single, simple unintended action - and I tried to undo it by pressing Ctrl-Z. I did this without thinking, because it is a function I am very accustomed to using.

I can't remember whether the initial accidentally small error I had tried to correct was in mis-typing two or three words, or cutting and pasting something into the wrong position, or what exactly, but it was something like that. The REALLY BAD mistake though, was to try to UNDO my last action by means of the Ctrl-Z shortcut. IT DELETED ALL OF MY LAST HALF-HOUR's WORK. And guess what? Ctrl-Y then did nothing. I pressed Ctrl-Y many times, to try to get it all back. It was a dead key-combination, producing no action at all.

Very fortunately, using a new TM function that I absolutely LOVE - the 'File Versions' function - I was able to use that to take me back to where I was, but this was only a rescue facility. Ctrl-Z remains DANGEROUS.

I mention Ctrl-Z and not the UNDO function available in the Edit menu, or with a toolbar icon, not because it is only Ctrl-Z that is broken, but only because I only ever use Ctrl-Z for this. I do not know whether the other UNDO methods are also dangerous to use.

I am unable to provide either a document exhibiting this behaviour or a video because as soon as it happens, the damage is done.
I can't undo back to where I was and re-run it to demonstrate how it happens because it is the UNDO function that is broken.

Please, SoftMaker, with all that your users have reported about this problem, is this not now sufficient for your developers to dig down into the code, flag settings, parameters, using source-level-debugging, to find out what is going on here?

[SuperTech]

Please allow us some time, our developer team is already trying our best to resolve this problem but because we couldn't provide them any reproducible scenario, it's difficult for them also.

Thanks

[JohnWasilewski]

Understood. Thank you. Sorry to be cross about it. Good luck to all.

[SuperTech]

Our development team has changed the Undo mechanism and improved on related processes which should solve this problem as it was not reproducible at our end. These changes will be incorporated in the next Service Pack of SoftMaker Office 2021.

Thank you