Keyboard select stops at @Mention

Rita Nygren

Has anyone else noticed the editing behavior in confluence when you try to use the keyboard to select text that contains a @Tag?  For example position the cursor the beginning of the line containing "text text text @Tag more text" and then hold Shift and hit DownArrow (to select a row of text) the selection won't go past the @Tag.   If I use the mouse to select, it works. 

We just upgraded to 6.11.2, and this was apparently available in our old v5 instance.

Is this a feature or a bug?

Edited to note:  This is only happening in Chrome.

Stephen Sifers

Hello Rita and welcome to the Community!

I just took you example and tested on a clean install of 6.11.2. I was able to confirm that while in chrome and you have a string of text with an @mention within, that when pressing SHIFT + DOWN ARROW to select text it will not pass the @mention within the string. I also confirmed this functions the same within safari. This is also presented within Confluence 6.12.2 as well. This is also present outside of the editor as well.

I tested within Confluence 5.10.9 and confirmed that this is not present within the editor, but it is present outside of the editor. The only different I was able to notice is within the editor the character ‘@’ is not displayed within the @mention. Outside of the editor, the ‘@’ is displayed causing the text select to pause.

Example from 5.10.9 Editor:

Example from 6.12.2 editor:

As you confirmed, a work around for this is to use the mouse to select text past an @mention.

Another work around is to use the same keyboard keys SHIFT + DOWN ARROW, when you reach an @mention you can simply keep pressing SHIFT + RIGHT ARROW to progress past the @mention.

The selection of text is actually find the "end of line" as the @mention of the user is a CSS class item. Here is a sample of the inspected element, you can see where the text string is broken by the @mention:

The browser is selecting everything that is text, up to the CSS @mention of the user. Once that is reached it is treated as the end of the text string thus stopping. This seems to be a browser related issue as the multiple browsers are unable to select past the CSS within the text string.

Very neat find and interesting to test through the versions.

Regards,
Stephen Sifers