Jumping tag selection

The tagging functionality in Discourse is le :bomb: .

An ickle nitpick: the way the tag selection interface jumps from top to bottom is really weird and disorienting. Example: I’m trying to type the tag javascript, so I type j, and I see this:

The autocomplete possibilities (which are awesome) are above the input field. Cool. Okay, now I type a, and I get this:

Now the interface has jumped below the input, presumably because it fits now. I can understand the utility of adapting to available space, and the amount of difficult code that must have been written to make that happen. But as ux, it’s pretty confusing.

  • Everything suddenly moves, and focus is lost (“Wait, where was I typing again?”)
  • The label optional tags looks to me like a placeholder, like it’s a text input. Given the fact that everything has moved, I often click on that to try to “keep editing”. Now the autocomplete drop-down closes.

It seems to me that it would be clearer and more consistent if the autocomplete never jumped below the input (the editor sticks to the bottom anyway, so it makes more sense for that to be the default since there’s more room above.)

:pray: thanks for reading & thanks for discourse

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