Max Greatest Annoyances #1: messages are not finalised by pressing Enter

Valery_Kondakoff's icon

Hello!

(For me) one of the most annoying things in a daily Max patching is accidentally pressing Enter when creating message while trying to finalise it. This happens dozen times a day! Instead of finalising my message Enter inserts a new line, which disappears after I click outside the newly created message, or press Shift-Enter.

Anyone else is suffering of this? At least I saw this issue many times in Max video tutorials in Youtube/Vimeo.

Why there is a new line in the message if Max does not supports new lines in messages? Is it possible to change the logic of finalising the message and let Enter finalise it? Please! Or there are some drawbacks in implementing this?

Short video to illustrate the issue:

message.mov
video/quicktime 252.49 KB
Floating Point's icon

this happens to me too; Mister 74 should fix it, because it's inconsistent with use of enter key with other objects

Roman Thilenius's icon

yet it is the expected behavior for a text engine

Valery_Kondakoff's icon

I don't complain for the same behaviour in comment object, because you can create multiline comments. But as the multiline messages are not supported (except for the semicolon syntax, which is another story), I still think pressing Enter should finalise message, just because Enter has no other functionality in this object.

Roman Thilenius's icon

then again, shouldnt enter not also trigger output in that case? :)

Valery_Kondakoff's icon

No I don't think the Enter should trigger output.

Here is the current behaviour: you create the message box, enter some text and when you press Enter just nothing happens: the new line appears, which disappears again if you enter Shift-Enter or click outside of message box to finalise the object.
Proposed behaviour: you create the message box, enter some text and press Enter to finalise the object. No output is triggered, as we are in Edit mode.

Pedro Santos's icon

Agreed, Valery Kondakoff.
A message box is more similar to an object box than to a text editor box, multi-line text is not even used in it, so the current implementation makes no sense whatsoever.

Roman Thilenius's icon

i was about to say "but thats how his sisters, the numberboxes work, for example."

but you are right: we are in edit mode.

vichug's icon

hmmmm i'm not sure, it's consistent with every other text editing objects in Max, it can help reading when you type in a long message at time of creation ; even if it doesnt create an actual inline it does separate symbols (so it's like a press of the spacebar) and i got used to shift enter, for message box and comment and object box alltogether. Not sure how it would piss me off if i just needed to enter for a message box, BUT the same in a comment box would just create an inline... Maybe leaving new lines in message box would be better ?

Valery_Kondakoff's icon

I'm pretty sure the ability to finalise message object by pressing Enter should be made optional (a checkbox in Max settings).

Pedro Santos's icon

@Vichug: you make a good point at the end of your post. I too would like to have control over the line breaks of message boxes, particularly when I use them to send multiple messages separated by commas as in:
reset,
do_x,
do_y,
bang
Visually it would be more intuitive than having a single line with all the commands...

Emmanuel Jourdan's icon

Do you know that you can press the tab key to finish the creation of the object?

Roman Thilenius's icon


the most frequently used method to finalize an object is... to click elsewhere. it is the only method you should need.

and if you ask me, all of these keyboard commands should be optional, too.