Control-Backspace fails to work as in other applications #bug

Christian Dümmer · March 21

Introduction

In most applications, when editing text (even in this textbox I'm filling now in Chrome) the Control+Backspace shortcut deletes the full preceding word, putting the cursor right after the preceding blank space (or at the beginning of the text box if just one word had been typed in). Now, if I want to keep deleting more of the preceding words, I can keep pressing Control+Backspace.

Example (the | bar indicates the cursor):

The quick brown fox|

Pressing Control+Backspace once causes the word "fox" to be deleted:

The quick brown |

Pressing Control+Backspace a second time would cause the preceding space AND the preceding word "brown" to be deleted:

The quick |

All in all, I can keep pressing Control+Backspace a few times and quickly delete most or all of the text in the input box.

MindMeister's issue

MindMeister, however, has a slightly different behavior. I'd go as far as saying this is actually a bug, not a feature request, but let's see if this reaches the proper audience.

In MindMeister, pressing Control+Backspace once DOES delete the preceding word, same as in any other app. However, pressing it a SECOND time does NOT do anything? Why, you ask? Well, it seems to think that as the preceding character is a blank space already, it does not need to keep deleting further words to the left.

Example (the | bar indicates the cursor):

The quick brown fox|

Pressing Control+Backspace once in MindMeister causes the word "fox" to be deleted:

The quick brown |

Pressing Control+Backspace a second time does NOT do anything:

The quick brown |

Which is, I'm sure you will agree, pretty frustrating. The blank space should NOT act as a "stop" sign which prevents deleting words further to the left.

Workaround

Currently, as the Control+Backspace shortcut is effectively disabled by a preceding blank space, the workaround is to press just Backspace once to delete the space, and then pressing Control+Backspace again to delete the previous word.

This means that, in order to delete several preceding words in MindMeister, one would neet to press a sequence of Control+Backspace Backspace Control+Backspace Backspace etc. repeteadly. (Or, of course, you could just select all of the text to be deleted and press Backspace or Delete once… but that kind of kills the editing flow.)

MeindMeister's behavior is clearly an error, or at least an omission in its logic.

Expected behavior

When other applications find the cursor to be located right after a blank space, the Control+Backspace shortcut deletes ANY preceding blank spaces PLUS the next word to the left of that. A blank space should NOT prevent the user from deleting multiple words using Control+Backspace repeatedly. That is what MindMeister should do, too.