Visual glitch when using backspace to clear text on multiple rows

[Mithil467]

Steps to reproduce:

Start mitype, preferably with a relatively lesser width terminal window.
Spam any wrong keys so that the text overflows to next line as shown below.

Try to clear those keys by pressing backspace.

Expected behaviour

Backspace should clear all the keys consistently.

Actual behaviour

The logic works as expected and does indeed clear text but doesn't update the screen visually for the lines below, but works fine for top line.

Proposed fix

Maybe we need to clear the entire screen if that is feasible.

[sks147]

Hi @Mithil467, can I pick up this issue.

[Mithil467]

Hey @sks147 👋
Thank you for your interest in contributing!
Please make sure to read the contributing guidelines before getting started :)

[sks147]

Sure.

[jai-dewani]

Since it has been a long time and no update seems to happen, Can I work on this issue?

[sks147]

Hi @jai-dewani, you can pick up this issue. @Mithil467 really sorry for no updates on this. I got really busy.
Thanks again @jai-dewani, you can get this assigned to you.

[Mithil467]

Actually, I was thinking about this. If the user spams keys, the app will crash when it is no longer possible to fit all the characters on a given screen window.
@jai-dewani can you try to restrict the self.current_word variable to not reflect the input character? That is when one entire line is filled up with characters, ignore any further input for characters, and do not append to the current_word.
This will indirectly solve this current issue and also avoid further issues related to screen size. Let me know your thoughts about this. :)

But, again this will cause issues if user types till the maximum length possible, but then resize the window and shrink its width. So restricting the length to a fixed constant like 20 sounds right (instead of the entire screen width).

[Mithil467]

@sks147 That's totally fine :)
@jai-dewani Sure you may go ahead with this!
You may refer to the PR #62 and just have a look at what was implemented and what conversation we had,

[jai-dewani]

Okay, restricting current_word seems like a very reasonable solution without over engineering this problem. A limit in the range of 20-30 sounds reasonable.

Do you think we should inform the user in some way about him reaching the limit of the wrong letters he has typed? Maybe a sound or a textual message at the bottom left/right saying
you have pressed too many wrong keys, try backspace to go back and type correctly

[Mithil467]

I like the idea of a visual indicator. We can change the color of the printed word to the red background (same as we do when the user types incorrectly) when the max length is reached.

[jai-dewani]

Wow, that seems like an even better indicator, I'll get going then.

I'll create a separate variable for the limit on current_word which can be easily updated to change the limit in the future if needed. Sounds good?

[Mithil467]

Yes. That'd be great :)