Sublime Forum

Sometimes tabs doesn't work properly

#1

Hi, There

I am the sublimetext user, thank you for this great text editor, please keep this simple editor: slight_smile:

I have an issue, sometimes tabs don’t work properly when I tick tab, the cursor goes to the random position.
please fix it.

I use window 10 and sublime text 4 free version.

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#2

Can you provide some visual examples of what happens when you press tab versus what you think should happen? That will help us narrow down what the problem might be.

There is no Sublime Text 4, nor is there a free version (of any version of Sublime). You can use Help > About in the menu to see what build number you’re running.

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#3

Hi, @OdatNurd

Yup, sorry, I use version 3 build 3143.

The problem, sometimes when tab pressed the cursor goes to random.
this issue does not happen every time.

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#4

You might have inserted a snippet or completion with fields before. In the status bar, it will show whether you are currently in a field list and pressing tab will move you forward to the next field. This can be disabled, but we need to know what’s happening exactly.

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#5

I have the same issue. Using v3.0 Build 3143.
EDIT: Ubuntu 16.04

Here is a video of my Sublime window.

https://digitalbrains.io/download/sublime-tab-complete.ogv

I create a new HTML doc, tab-complete a div (which works) then using my keyboard arrow key, drop down into the newly created div and try to tab-complete a ‘p’ tag. You can see I try it 3 times before the tab-complete works properly. The first time the cursor jumps behind the ‘p’, the second attempt the cursor jumps ahead of the closing ‘div’ and the third time is the charm!

Note: This seems to only happens when the containing element was created with tab-complete. Or at least related to that behavior.

Chris

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#6

This is a side effect of some third party package that you have installed; what you’re seeing there isn’t the native Sublime behaviour for this particular feature.

In core Sublime, entering div and pressing Tab in an HTML file will expand the tag to <div></div> and leave the cursor between the tags for you to enter the content.

What you’re seeing here is a package that’s trying to be more clever about how tags are expanded by using snippets.

The sequence of events is probably supposed to go like this:

  • You enter div and press Tab
  • The text expands to a full <div> tag, but the cursor is still inside of the start tag
  • The status line shows you the text Field 1 of 3 to tell you that you’re field 1 of a 2 field snippet (the third field is the point at which you “exit” the snippet and go back to normal editing).
  • The position of the cursor suggests that you’re meant to type any attributes that you might need on this tag as field 1.
  • You enter any tag attributes you want (including none at all), and then press Tab to go to field 2
  • This jumps the cursor between the tags, so you can enter some content inside. The status line now says Field 2 of 3 to tell you you’re in the second field.
  • You enter some text for the content of the tag (including None at all) and press Tab one last time
  • The cursor jumps outside of the <div> tag, which also exits the snippet
  • At this point the status line no longer says what field you’re in; the snippet is complete and you’re back in normal editing mode.

What’s actually happening is this:

  • You enter div and press Tab
  • The text expands to a full <div> tag, but the cursor is still inside of the start tag
  • Instead of pressing Tab, you arrow down into the div; however the status line shows you that Sublime still thinks that you’re inside of a snippet (it says Field 1 of 3).
  • You enter a p and press Tab, thinking that it’s going to expand the tag out, but it doesn’t
  • What actually happens is that the cursor jumps to before the p, which is the point where field 2 is set to allow you to enter the snippet body; the status line says Field 2 of 3
  • You arrow past the p one more time and press tab, thinking that it’s going to expand the tab out, but it doesn’t
  • What actually happens is that the cursor jumps to the end of the <div> tag, which is the point where field 3 (the exit point of the snippet) is set to jump you out of the tag so you can finish editing; the status line no longer says anything about fields.
  • You arrow back up and press Tab, which this time actually expands the tag
  • The cursor is left inside of the <p></p> tag pair so you can enter some text, but this again is a snippet; the status line says Field 1 of 2, to tell you that after you enter the contents, you should press Tab to jump the cursor to the end of the tag.

Basically short story long, if you want to keep using the package that you’re using (my guess would be Emmet), after you expand a tag you should press Esc to exit out of snippet mode and back into regular editing mode; if you do that, things will work the way you expect.

If that solves all of your problems, that package is probably not what you want to use, so you can disable/uninstall it. As mentioned above, core sublime handles tag expansions in HTML files by creating the tag pair and leaving the cursor inside of them for you to edit but otherwise does nothing special, which sounds like what you want to do.

Alternatively, the package in question might have some sort of configuration that you can use to tell it to just expand tags without all of the fancy snippet handling that’s getting in your way.

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#7

Thank you for the detailed explanation. And you are correct, it was a package. This one to be exact:

Issue solved for me.

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#8

Not fixed for me.
I think you don’t understand.
I can’t provide video because the problem comes at the random time.

The problem, when I press tab the cursor go to random to top/bottom.

Please fix this, this is annoying.

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