Inline styles applied with something other than markdown shortcut are lost after a single letter

[Rosey]

Just testing this on the spectrum.chat site:

1. start typing a message
2. Press cmd-b to make text bold
3. Continue typing

Expected result: Text is bold from the time you cmd-b until ... forever, unless you press cmd-b again. Actual result: The first letter you type after cmd-b will be bold but all subsequent letters will revert to unstyled.

[Rosey]

I think https://github.com/withspectrum/draft-js-markdown-plugin/commit/935fe755ee3b30c371d55366198efd0555dffbe0 is the culprit, which I'm sure you have already figured out as the author, haha. Probably takes longer for me to sort through everything. I wonder if there's some way to get the best of both worlds here...

[Rosey]

Here's a possible solution that might be a terrible idea but I'll just write it down in case it's not terrible.

Markdown shortcut applied styles are updated to be complex inline styles keyed with markdown-BOLD and are written to behave/appear the same way as BOLD so no one can tell the difference? But then when doing this unstickyInlineStyles we only unsticky if the inline style is a markdown prefixed style?

🙊 oh gosh that's probably too complicated of a solution, hopefully someone else has a smart idea 🤓

[mxstbr]

Huh, I didn't even know you could press CMD+B to make things bold. How do you stop making things bold and where is that shortcut coming from?

[mxstbr]

Markdown shortcut applied styles are updated to be complex inline styles keyed with markdown-BOLD and are written to behave/appear the same way as BOLD so no one can tell the difference? But then when doing this unstickyInlineStyles we only unsticky if the inline style is a markdown prefixed style?

Yeah that could work, would just require a lot of internal hacking around and would probably break integration with some other plugins. 🤔

Maybe we can override CMD+B to not only make things bold but also disable unstickyInlineStyles until you stop typing bold text? (however one does that when pressing CMD+B) Are there other shortcuts like that?

[Rosey]

There's a bunch of shortcuts and then we'll encounter the same issue when pressing toolbar buttons if a user has any kind of tool bar in place :( but I agree my suggestion is too complicated too.

[Rosey]

Re: your question, the cmd b etc is something you have to implement, but draft does make it easy to add https://draftjs.org/docs/api-reference-rich-utils.html RichUtils.handleKeyCommand

[Rosey]

If an elegant solution is tricky to find, in the interim is there any possibility we could add an option to disable the unstickyInlineStyles functionality?

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One other possible solution I thought of is always adding an additional markdown-shortcut inline style any time an inline style is applied via this plugin, and unsticky-ing the "normal styles" only IF that inline style is present. BUT I think that would also be bug prone and edge casey :/ Sorry for not having smarter ideas!

[andrewfan]

@Rosey @mxstbr I think the best solution will be to use custom change type here https://github.com/withspectrum/draft-js-markdown-plugin/blob/master/src/modifiers/handleInlineStyle.js#L64 (the place where we convert chars sequence to text with inline style) and unstick styles only if current state was modified with that custom type change.

Will make a PR for it

[Kysumi]

Just run into this problem when using this plugin. Are there any known workarounds or plans to resolve this issue?