Hi jmasson@atlassian.com

Thanks for taking the time to raise this issue. This has been on our backlog now for 2 years with very little progress being made in that time. Rather than leave this here I'm going to close this issue as won't fix, I believe that this better reflects the status of this issue.

Regards
Steve Haffenden
Confluence Bugmaster
Atlassian

Original comment for additional detail:

As I've gone through the relearning curve for the new editor and figured out the new patterns for getting things done, I do see one somewhat pervasive "negative" pattern with the 4.x experience. I think it's this pervasive "negative" pattern that is the root cause of many of the complaints about specific bugs, or about the general bugginess of the editor as a whole. In other words, I think that many perceived bugs have one root cause.

The root cause is the lack of a general "panic button" to force the editor to drop all text-oriented states and return to plaintext entry in whatever block element you're currently working in.

Here's one specific example I run into a LOT. I flip back and forth between trying to use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-I and Ctrl-B to toggle bold and italic on and off, versus using the "markup shortcuts" of surrounding the text with * and _. Invariably when trying to use the keyboard shortcuts, I manage to get into a state where the editor is confused and will not let me get back to a non-italic/bold text entry mode no matter what I do. Backspacing over everything won't work. Carefully toggling Ctrl-I or Ctrl-B won't work. Literally nothing works.

Again, this is just one specific example of a larger pattern: the editor getting "confused" and "stuck" in a particular text entry state.

To solve this problem, I propose that you add a "panic button" to the toolbar (and a corresponding keyboard shortcut), whose function is to brute-force the editor to toggle off all possible text entry states and return the editor to plaintext entry mode. This is conceptually similar to the "stop all playback" or "panic button" feature that is found in most audio sequencing applications and desktop audio workstation applications, where it's common for external tone generators to become "stuck" and you need to send MIDI commands to brute-force all tone generators to stop everything they're doing.