Bug 165579 – Providing Touch Bar buttons from JavaScript based on editor cursor position

• Component: HTML Editing
• Status: NEW

[Andrew Herron]

In many rich text editors contextual buttons are made available to the user based on cursor position. This seems like a perfect use case for having the buttons appear on the Touch Bar to provide detailed access to potentially obscure features.

We have a couple of examples at Ephox:

https://www.tinymce.com has floating toolbars that appear in scenarios such as when an image is selected or the cursor is in a table

https://textbox.io has buttons that appear on the end of the main toolbar in the same scenarios. We've discussed moving them to a floating toolbar but the Touch Bar would be an awesome alternative.

In particular, the textbox.io table buttons could make great use of a dynamic Touch Bar slider to adjust cell border width, or an expanded colour picker for the cell border and background buttons. The same could even be applied to other more common features such as font size adjustment and text/highlight colour pickers.

I'm not asking for complete canvas-like access to the Touch Bar, that seems like it would be too easy to abuse (an "allow access" popup may alleviate that but there are already a lot of those). I think a way to replicate contextual buttons as seen in native editors would be a great start.

[Beth Dakin]

Interesting feedback! I definitely get the idea, but would you be willing to attach screenshots of the extra buttons / floating toolbars just out of curiosity? I haven't yet succeeded in making them appear by playing around with these sites, and it would be nice to have a visual of the request.

[Andrew Herron]

Created attachment 296596 [details]
contextual features video

Hmm. We have had feedback that the textbox.io buttons aren't obvious enough, but the TinyMCE floating toolbars are fine. Curious that you couldn't spot them in either editor.

I'll do one better than screenshots; here's a video of the features I described.

[Piotrek Koszuliński (Reinmar)]

There are relevant comments on Chromium's issue tracker:

* https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=660126#c33
* https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=660126#c35

Plus, there's a thread on W3C's Editing TF mailing list:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-editing-tf/2017Jan/0000.html