Description:

What happens currently when editing a description is that your edits are discarded if the Escape key is pressed.

There are many reasons why the Escape key can be pressed by mistake in today's browser use and varied workflows, and so users end up losing their unsaved descriptions.

Furthermore, Jira itself encourages the use of the Escape key to clear the focus of the current fields.

If you click away from a description edit box to lose focus, your work is saved. However, if you use the Escape key to lose focus, your work is discarded. This is inconsistent behavior.

The above behavior is in contrast to how editing comments behaves. When editing comments, navigating away whether by click, escape key, or page refresh, will popup an alert for the user to confirm their action (when there are changes to the comment).

I'm not sure why editing comments is given so much more importance than editing issue descriptions, but both edit operations should behave consistent with eachother, as it is confusing for the user to have separate behaviors depending on what you edit.

What should happen:

1. Make editing issue descriptions behave the same way as when editing comments.

• Alert box will show when there is risk of losing changes.

2. As a way of allowing users to preserve current behavior with mininal disruption, provide users a way to configure the behavior of the ESC key in description boxes. Possible (but not exaustive) list of choices:

• Escape to discard changes, no confirmation (Current behavior, should be default for existing accounts)
• Escape to discard changes, require confirmation (Can be default for new accounts)
• Escape to save changes, no confirmation (Alternatively, can be default for new accounts)
• Escape only to lose focus but leaving text area in edit mode
• Do nothing

See: my previous comments for a longer rant on this topic.