It’s been a long time since we discussed with the Discourse team that it is natural behaviour in many people to mouse-move and click-select words or phrases or whole lines while reading on the Internet:
It’s not an exception with the topic Title. Sometimes I click on it while reading, and sometimes I actually need to select some or all of it and then copy to the clicpboard.
So now that you made it enter into the editing mode just by clicking, I cannot simply click on it, or select a few words, or the whole title, in order to copy it – because now clicking activates the editing mode. Not only is it ugly (but that’s a separate question), but it’s also incredibly annoying and frustrating. I don’t want any TEXT to activate some “edit” mode simply because I clicked on it. I want buttons to do that, not text - the way it works everywhere in your UI anyway.
If you follow this same logic, then you should also make the topic/reply body text editable when you click on the text, or the topic assiggnee editable when you click on it, etc.
For some reason you maintain a separate “Pencil” button for editing across your UI, but you now broke this convention for the Title.
And besides all that, it also just looks ugly, don’t you find so? – i.e. like someone messed up the css for the mouse hover style:
Another issue with this new approach is that the cursor is never preserved after the click - i.e. if I click at the end of the second word, it will enter into the edit mode, but will not place the cursor at the end of the second word; this is not what the user expects when he sees the cursor and clicks on a particular position:
When you had an “edit” button, at least you would not set that expectation by displaying the “cursor” icon. But now you set the expectation that it is editable inline; but it is not. The “least surprise” principle gets broken for no reason.
Overall, this update looks like an update for the sake of an update, not guided by any practicalities. My suggestion is to consider the arguments given in this topic and either rollback it or improve it further to the point where it makes complete sense and is intuitive. The way it works now is, it just breaks all your UI conventions for no reason. And imo the absense of the “edit” button (like everywhere else) is actually a degrade and not an improvement - because it breaks the convention.