This is something I really enjoy in wordpress too, and miss in discourse on a daily basis. It allows you to write a whole bunch of text, then go through adding hyperlinks extremely quickly and naturally.
With the functionality I proposed, you kind of half the whole process, as you only select then paste. If no text is selected, the paste will work as usual (i.e. just insert the clipboard text).
In every editor I know of, if you jselect some text and paste from a clipboard, that text is overwritten by what’s in the clipboard. What you are suggesting would do away with the existing function of replace text with what’s in the clipboard.
Not selecting any text and pasting from clipboard is a simple PASTE action.
Selecting text and pasting from a clipboard is a REPLACE TEXT action with what is in the clipboard.
Inserting hyperlink - using the already supplied button - is the easiest way to insert a link in whatever text you select by selecting the text first.
Inserting a hyperlink without text is clicking on the button, paste the link, click okay or hit enter or by just typing or pasting a link to a blank space.
I don’t see why you would want to take the universal Select & Replace Text function and convert that into what the existing button already does without losing that function common to all text editors. What would happen if you wanted to replace text with other text if you lose the Select & Replace function?
In Wordpress, what determines whether the text is replaced with what’s in the clipboard or inserts a hyperlink without overwriting the existing text using a simple select & paste as you suggest? Surely a simple highlighting of text and clicking paste cannot perform both functions or do one function without losing the other.
Or am I missing something?
As is already in Discourse, typing in or pasting a URL does turn it into a clickable link without having to use the Insert Link feature. Then you have the Onebox feature. And you have the Insert Link button already.
Paste inserts text. Select and paste replaces the text. Select and delete/back space deletes the text.
A combination of clipboard content and editor state:
If cliboard content is not a valid URL: the paste will act just as you said (replace any selected text or append it at the cursor otherwise)
If the clipboard is an URL and:
no text selected: the URL will be inserted at the cursor position
text selected: use that text as an anchor text.
Considering that there are a few other things that doesn’t quite work as other editors (cough, cough), I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be such a big problem for users
Meanwhile I’ve figured out what I was doing wrong (and updated the post to prevent others persist in my mistake), now I can run it, but I have no spare time. Maybe in the near future
I didn’t even know Wordpress or anything else did this, so wouldn’t have thought of asking, but it would be handy, and likely wouldn’t cause huge surprises (I’ve never tried to overwrite any text with a URL, and if I were to then I’d understand what was happening).
Honestly it’s just such a lovely feature in wordpress. Hypertext is a great thing, and foundational concept for the web, of course… but going back adding 10 links to a post is really irritating unless you can simply copy and paste them. So I don’t bother, unless I’m using wordpress. There should really be no surprise that pasting a link creates a link.
I just tried this in the zettlr editor, it doesn’t have the wordpress paste-to-create-link but does have similar behaviour for ctrl-k… With an URL in the clipboard, you …
select text
press ctrl-k
… and that’s it, the text becomes a link. Alternatively you can right-click to add a link. In discourse you have to:
select text
press ctrl-k
press ctrl-v
press enter
This really breaks the flow of marking up some text.
I’m not sure if browser security would let you paste with ctrl-k, but really I think the wordpress behaviour is perfect.
edit I’ve noticed that slack has the same link-on-paste behaviour as wordpress, so that’s another well-used UI to embrace this feature.
