Hi everyone,

After careful consideration, we've decided to prioritize making ESC key behaviour consistent across description and comment edit operations on Jira Server roadmap. 

We hope to start development after our current projects are completed. Expect to hear an update on our progress within the next 6 months. 

To learn more on how you suggestions are reviewed, see our updated workflow for server feature suggestions.

Kind regards,

Jira Server Product Management

FWIW: My Jira user profile has a setting named "Keyboard shortcuts:". It is currently set to "Disabled". However, the Escape key still does something (i.e. discards my work).

IMHO if I set "Keyboard shortcuts:" to "Disabled" the Escape key should do nothing.

I'm getting this complain on a daily basis from dozens of people across my organization. I don't know what to say to them anymore. I just went through all the tickets and calculated more than 50 man hours of lost work since the beginning of this year.
Having in mind the money we pay Atlansian every year I would expect a little more proactivity for correcting these small bugs from your part, instead of waiting for a bug report to be filled with a dozens of comments of angry people before you decided to act on it.

+1. Just lost 10 minutes of work. I hit Alt + Tab to go to another window, then changed my mind and hit Escape while still holding Alt. Apparently even Alt + Escape will discard all edits to an issue description.

This issue has been open for two and a half years. It's wasting a lot of people's time. It should be simple to add a warning. There have been many other updates to JIRA. What's the hold up for this simple one that adds huge value?

+1 just lost 31 minutes of work

+1 just lost 30 minutes of work.

Just lost a couple of hours work because I hit the "context menu" key on my keyboard, then instinctively closed it with ESC. However the ESC event also bubbled up to JIRA and destroyed all my work.

Please add a confirmation prompt! Every other edit screen in JIRA seems to have one...

Yes, it's really terrible behavior. I've also described the problem here: JRA-61439

An extremely simple solution to all of these problems is just to prompt user to confirm action if there are unsaved changes.
Even Microsoft gets this right

This has been spread over so many issues, that all alarms should be going off. However, maybe it helps to collect all causes, symptoms, and alternatives suggested? (Probably not.) Especially since the motivations for current behavior, only consider a prompt-alternative, and I see more (see last part).

Motivations for current behavior

• "inline edit should be fast and simple in use"
• "The majority of people actually use the Esc button as a path to cancel their actions"
• a prompt would probably "slow down the majority of use-cases"
• "We wanted to provide our users the ability to use it without thinking how they should behave and what they should do next while editing." [SIC]
• "(...) use of escape as a shortcut in dialog boxes for No, Quit, Exit, Cancel, or Abort, as well as a common shortcut key for the Stop button in many web browsers".
• "I can't find another way how we could do it better, so the solution would be acceptable to you and other users out there"

Motivations for different behavior

• losses are too many and too large to ignore
• inconsistency with "Comments" and "Shares"
• ESC to another popup is not always 'stopped', but bubbles/propagates to Jira
• expected behavior was loosing focus while saving the content
• can not be disabled by disabling Keyboard Shortcuts
• too many accidents can happen (see 'Reasons' below)
• external editor (alternative) has no preview (formatting)
• 'Edit' is not a Dialog box

Reasons to press escape without wanting to cancel

• ESC-aping something else
  • trying to ESC-ape something on one window, but accidentally Jira has the keyboard focus (esp. with multiple monitors)
  • ESC-ape mistyped Chinese characters
  • ESC-ape spelling suggestion by browser
  • ESC-ape popup which displays on top without getting focus
  • ESC-ape dialog for saving webpage (Ctrl-S)
• wrong shortcut: VI-users
• mistyping:
  • missed from tilda (ESC-ape is close to it on many keyboards)
  • ESC-aping from Alt-Tab, but hit ESC twice? (or long?)
  • press Ctrl-ESC, but hitting ESC first? (Ctrl-ESC = shortcut Windows Start Menu)

Alternatives/work-arounds

• configurable ESC-behavior
  • user can configure choose behavior of ESC
  • user can set different shortcut for "abort" (e.g. CTRL/ALT-ESC)
  • user can disable by disabling Keyboard Shortcuts
  • adapt ESC-behavior upon certain amount of changes
• enable restore/undo
  • add "undo" button (back, ...)
  • remember last changes (like re-entering edited "Share") when restarting Edit
  • remember personal history of a few last canceled text edits
• ask confirmation to prevent loss
  • always prompt on ESC-aping changes (like leaving edited "Comments")
  • prompt on ESC-aping upon certain amount of changes

BTW: Typed and (re)editted in Notepad++

Bump for bad UI. Lost another 10 liner.
Seems like a quick js hack to turn it into double escape in succession or cmd+esc / alt+esc.