Also Escape

I was unable to reproduce this at commit e96ab81. Has it been fixed already?
OS: Windows 10 Enterprise N - 1803 (17134.590)

I am able to reproduce this issue and I'd like to fix it. I believe I've found the relevant code in developerActions.ts

@joaomoreno, Would it be better to have counters for the number of times Backspace or Escape is pressed? Or to just display the key once without any counters?

Here what I mean by counters:

I don't think we need counters at all. Wouldn't simply Backspace suffice, no matter how many times you press it?

Yeah, you're right. I'll fix it up and send a pull request.

It seems like other screencasting applications have the counter concept as well. I think it might be better to make it configurable.

Carnac (Windows app) seems to have this behavior by default: https://youtu.be/kSL-DhACBEk?t=293

Screencast (Linux app) notes:

Compress repeats
When enabled, contiguous repeated sequences are truncated after the requested threshold. A counter of total occurrences is shown instead, which is generally more legible.

Screenkey (Linux app). It's a configurable setting. Demonstration:
https://youtu.be/OkD0VkGe20I?t=269

That's certainly another option. We could even style the counters so they look different. We'll leave it off by default. How would I go about adding it to the settings?

Also, I think it would be more readable if letters/numbers/symbols didn't have spaces in between them and respected the case they were typed in. What do you guys think?

I had the same idea about the spaces and casing too, but I didn't want to go overboard. Maybe the counters were a bit too much for this bug fix as well and it should've been handled in a seperate feature request issue.

I agree with leaving it off by default. I'm trying to figure out how to modify the settings now. I think it should be under the Text Editor > Screencast category or Features > Screencast (they don't exist)

Lets see what @joaomoreno says.

I really don't have an opinion. We should make the simplest thing possible. I'm not keen on adding settings, since VS Code is not a screencasting tool. ;)

I'm not sure if that reasoning stands now that VS Code became a tool that has screencasting capabilities. Although I think we all agree that the focus should be on making the tool better for coding, I think we can make this feature better with the suggested changes and make the most of it. Who knows, maybe this will be a feature that will persue someone on a conference to give VS Code a try :) (I'm thinking about teachers, streamers)

I think that we should create another issue though with the feature-request tags to discuss and track those changes there, while we fix the issue with a single Backspace or Escape output here. I'll have to work now, but I could create the issue later.

Would that work for you @dyc3 ?

Sounds like a plan. I'll send the pull request with the simple fix later today.