I noticed that empty cells no longer auto-delete when they’re deselected. I think I can eventually get used to this, but currently I’m on Firefox on macOS and clicking the “trash” icon on the right of cells doesn’t do anything. The merging keyboard shortcuts work as expected though.
In Chrome, I see that clicking that icon creates “Cancel” and “Delete” buttons which do work properly.
Are you sure? This should only happen if the cell is pinned.
Can confirm. Looks like a mouseout/mouseleave triggers early in Firefox?
I’m quite sure, I just tested again in Firefox and Chrome (on macOS)!
You’re right, can confirm.
@mbostock Are you guys perhaps moving a bit too fast with the recent updates?
We’ve fixed the bug that was causing the Delete button to disappear on Firefox. Sorry for the trouble. (The recommended keyboard shortcut to delete a cell is to select all the text, delete it, and then option-delete/alt-backspace to merge the now-empty cell into the cell above.)
The change to not automatically delete empty cells is fully intentional, albeit unannounced. Auto-deletion was a little magical, and we think this is no longer necessary now that we have a delete button and that empty cells appear blank rather than evaluating to undefined. Auto-deletion of empty cells also made it easy to lose uncommitted changes with collaborative editing, which is coming soon.
Thanks @mbostock and the rest of the team for getting the fix in so quickly (and on a holiday too)! Observable is certainly on my list of things I’m thankful for this year!
Not sure I understand. That scratchpad has many empty cells, so if you delete one, there are still other empty cells?
I was trying to demonstrate two points:
Yes, the cropped delete confirmation button has always been the case for screens between ~1100px and ~1300px. (Below this it moves above the cell editor.) We’ve now increased the minimum-width threshold required to place the delete and move buttons into the right margin, but this UI will be replaced in the near future with a consolidated cell menu.
As for the lack of visual indicator for empty cells, well, yes. That’s because they are empty, and we want an interface that affords a clean reading experience in addition to editing. I suppose we could prevent you from creating multiple adjacent empty cells, but I don’t really see anything wrong with having empty cells, especially since you can quickly delete them with repeated option-delete/alt-backspace as desired.
… Oh. I thought the confirmation was a recent addition. Since when has it been around? My workflow for deleting cells always is was to just empty a cell and unfocus it.
We added the Delete button (with confirmation) back in June. Option-Delete/Alt-Backspace doesn’t require confirmation because it only applies when the cell is already empty.
