Multiple reply/post buffers?

Feature
1

Apologies if this has been discussed previously but I couldn’t find any reference to it…

Anyway I was looking at NodeBB and noticed that they have multiple buffers in tabs for replying and posting. Is this on the roadmap for Discourse or has it been previously discussed and discarded?
I think it is good that you can continue to browse discussions whilst typing a reply, but in the event that a user is typing a long and detail reply to one topic, whilst browsing around they may stumble or be notified of another topic that they want to type a short reply to. However currently in Discourse you would need to either hurry up and finish your post or copy and paste your long, under construction reply to a temporary buffer like Notepad. Although the latter is a trivial matter, it would still be more fluid to have separate tabs for each reply/post.
Combined with Discourse’s syncing of replies to user accounts this would be a great benefit…

3 Likes
2

Yes this has been discussed many times. Search for “drafts”.

Right now we support a few drafts:

  • draft for one topic
  • draft for one reply

(not entirely sure if we have a unique draft for PMs, probably doesn’t matter)

The use of the word “buffer” here underscores my concern that this is a feature that would only be of rare use to extremely advanced power users anyway.

3

not entirely correct

  • 1 draft slot per topic (used for either reply or edit)
  • 1 draft slot for new topics

you can actually use multiple drafts for replies …

  1. Start typing reply
  2. Minimize typing window
  3. Go reply to something else
  4. Return to original topic … draft will be there

I do want to get around to doing draft management one day but this is not a v1 thing, plenty more urgent stuff.

5 Likes
4

Aha, I forgot we had one draft reply per topic. I thought it was one shared reply draft for all topics.

So yes, to answer the original post – you can already do what you want to do.

Here’s a screenshot of me with two draft replies in progress to two different topics at once:

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