Undo Escape key press to recover past work

[Arun Radhakrishnan]

The "ESC" keypress removes the popup used to create an issue and all the work done till then in updating an issue is lost. Is there a way to undo the Escape key press  and recover edits that were being done? If not, I think this is a required feature.

[Mitko Razboynikov]

@joshloeYou could implement "draft save" like you have in Confluence, to avoid frustrating experience, without breaking the escape key.

[Michael Bar-Dov]

Restoring level achieved in traffic escape.

[Max Cascone]

I just had this happen to me again, and I have to give @joshloe credit here, because that Typio extension recovered what I'd entered beautifully. I've used it a few other times where I've accidentally closed a window, or similar, and it's great. It sits there in the background until you need it, and it turns what would be a super-frustrating event into a mild inconvenience. I have mine set to only show itself when I double-click in a field, so I don't even see it unless I need it.

Highly recommended, especially for readers of this thread.

[joshloe]

Arun,

The Behavior of the esc key closing out the Popup window, is a standard for browser behavior and is not something that we will be changing as changing this behavior would cause confusion for the majority of users, and added learning curve with counterintuitive methods to complete actions to an already complex system.

Additional details on the reasoning behind this decision are noted on this feature request:

* https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-36670

There is a workaround however, if you're interested there is an extension for Chrome called Typio which will autosave and allow you to recover lost data that is inputed.  It might be worth looking into if this is a common occurrence, as it is for me as well :).

-Josh Loe

[Arun Radhakrishnan]

Hi Josh,

 Thank you for the link to the feature request and workaround. However, I would like to disagree on the reasoning behind not doing this:

1) The popup close on escape may be default browser behavior but the ask is not to change browser behavior but to preserve state of an entity that users have been updating (in this case a jira issue). 

2) There is less scope of confusion to existing users if the implementation were such that there is a hinted text with link to "undo escape" shown for X seconds after the popup closes. This is the pattern used on Gmail for example where you can undo last action. 

Considering the pain caused to users who lost a lot of their work and cannot recover this, I think Atlassian should be fixing this and delighting its users. The complexity in this implementation is accidental and not essential - as long as the state of the issue being updated is saved somewhere and can be recovered, the user experience is not going to change significantly.

[Max Cascone]

Agreed. Losing a bunch of work to an errant "esc" is one of the most maddening things that can happen. Just now I accidentally pressed the Windows button while i was editing a story; i pressed Esc to close the Start Menu, and poof went my edits. They weren't even the window in focus! I'll check out that extension, but it's just inexcusable to have such a painful failure mode in one of the primary UX's of the product.

[Adam Sloane]

Please fix this. Its one of the most frustrating things 

[Phil G]

At least with an Activity log in Jira, it remembers what you typed, thankfully. The comment box will say "You have an unsaved comment". So just click back into the comments box and save.