Hi SDL, thank you for your "support".

Two weeks passed and still no answer and no help. 

Just great...

Michael Beijer, Adrian Palme

I'm afraid there is no good answer for this.  We are well aware of the problems with keyboard shortcuts but seem unable to fit the work in that is required to resolve it.  So I can't give you an answer that will be helpful in the short term at all... I wish I could.

I know you think a company of this size should be able to sort this out but I'm afraid it is never as simple as that. I also know there is little point in me trying to explain to you why because it won't help, nor will it make any difference.  We are looking at ways in which we can resource this work specifically and focus more on the improvements that are needed to ensure Studio is more performant so things like this simply work as expected.

Michael Beijer, Adrian Palme

I'm afraid there is no good answer for this.  We are well aware of the problems with keyboard shortcuts but seem unable to fit the work in that is required to resolve it.  So I can't give you an answer that will be helpful in the short term at all... I wish I could.

I know you think a company of this size should be able to sort this out but I'm afraid it is never as simple as that. I also know there is little point in me trying to explain to you why because it won't help, nor will it make any difference.  We are looking at ways in which we can resource this work specifically and focus more on the improvements that are needed to ensure Studio is more performant so things like this simply work as expected.

I am not in the pay list of SDL but, this comment is one of a Good kind.
Whatever its content, reply itself is important.
I am hoping the positive one the next time.

1. You have no good answer for this? Maybe you can explain, why I have been promised by SDL support a few months ago, that this problem will be solved with Studio 2019 SR2. Did not happen. Unfortunately, this problem is known since 4 or 5 years at least.

2. UNDO is in my eyes somehow one of the basic functions of every editor. The last tool without UNDO I did ever use was a Czech text editor in 1995!!!

3. Maybe you should recommend me, that I write an AHK script to solve this crap. Which did already happen once, that I have been recommended to solve YOUR problem by myself. This recommendation came with a funny ";-)" smiley...

Adrian Palme

I have tried to be honest with you because you do deserve a response.  But there is nothing I can do to change the current situation other than continue to represent these concerns with the product management teams.

I also don't know what you expect to achieve by asking me to explain why something that was promised by Support wasn't delivered.  Clearly the support team were advised that the work was planned in, but then for one reason or another it didn't happen.  Not the fault of the support team, and probably not the fault of the development teams who planned to tackle this either.  If other work takes longer than expected, or something important is dropped into the schedule then something else gets dropped.  That's the reality.

The fact some of these problems are many years old is not good, and the reason I'm trying to be honest with you is because we are entirely at fault and should have addressed this properly by now.  I can only support the need to get this done as a priority effort, gather the criticism from you in this forum and share it where I hope it will do the most good.

Thank you for your comprehensive answer.

Let me now illustrate this case on another situation. Imagine you buy a car, a premium car like e.g. Audi or Mercedes - because SDL Studio is a premium product on the CAT market. You find out, the breaks are not working from the first moment on. What do you do now? You contact your repair service - because you have some warranty and you want to use it. And the repair service wants you

1. To understand the organization structure of the car company

2. To understand, that they (the car repair service) did not develop the breaks, it was the developer.

3. To understand, that the developers are well-informed about the problem. That they also have promised to solve this problem, though, but now they are developing brakes for another car, so it is clear, that they do not have time to put right yours.

4. An last but not least you should be aware of the fact, that you will be helped only if you pay aprox. 1/5 of the car price p.a. and buy a service contract. Otherwise the car warranty is related only to two problems - if you can not start or unlock the car.

Do you understand my point? This is how SDL treats his customers.

ok Adrian Palme

Please provide me with the exact steps to reproduce the Ctrl+Z not working and I will escalate this again to development.  I can conclude from your cryptic message at the start that you are running a search and replace in multiple files but I am unable to reproduce.

I have put a short video here showing you what I am doing.  Perhaps this will help you to provide some proper instructions that I can follow to achieve the problem you are encountering with Ctrl+Z. Being able to reproduce a problem is an essential part of fixing it... I hope you can understand that?

You also say this has been known for 4 or 5 years.  Please show me how you know this and where I can validate this?  Throw away comments based on heresay or complaints you have seen over the years in the forums doesn't mean anything.  We don't investgate every complaint in every public forum and enter them into our database.  Complaints could be completely unfounded, and many of them come from the same users over and over again... which like it or not points towards other problems and not necessarily only problems with Studio.

I have just run a search in our database like this:

You can see the query and I only get two results returned... neither of which seem to relate to what I'm guessing you are referring to.

Please provide me with the steps to reproduce this and I will ensure there is a bug logged for this, I'll give you the bug number, and you can track that, and refer to it if we never fix it in the future.

I can find 29 unresolved bugs related to keyboard shortcuts (two of these are the undo problems I shared above)... each one is reproducible and most only occur under very specific crcumstances.  There are some general issues that affect everyone and this is what I've been referring to when I talk about problems with keyboard shortcuts.

But you are complaining about this very specific problem with Ctrl+Z.  So, I have been completely open with you and only ask that you provide some reproducible steps and we will investigate it.

I have not written anything about search and replace here. I have complained that CTRL+Z is not working. At the same time, the UNDO function does not work. This happens not always but randomly when I open several files from various projects.
It happened right now. I have changed something in the text (first screen shot) and you can see in the second screen shot, that the undo function is gray = not active. And the shortcut CTRL+Z does not work too. In this moment 2 files from 2 different projects are opened.

That's the exact description of what I'm doing. I can not write more. I just open a second file to translate and the function randomly stops working. In the Studio 2019 SR1 in this case also e.g. CTRL+A, CTRL+F did not work. The bug could be fixed by running the Concordance Search. Then the function was restored. Now in SR2 nothing works, I have to close and to reopen the files or even to restart Studio.

The problem I am reporting here has been reported to SDL Support several times in the past few years. The last time in April & July/August 2019.

In April I got the following messages from SDL Support:

And here you will find the promise I got in July/August 2019 from the SDL support in several mails regarding Case No. 00437446:

I have reported this very same problem repeatedly since 2015. 

As you understand, I can not agree with your statement:

Paul said:

But you are complaining about this very specific problem with Ctrl+Z.

It is not a "very specific problem".

This problem is very well known since a long time. And it is not only about the keyboard shortcut. It is about the UNDO function itself, which stops working too.

Adrian Palme said:

I have not written anything about search and replace here. I have complained that CTRL+Z is not working.

Well... it does work for me so I need more than this.  Sometimes we have to do a bit of detective work because the decriptions of the problems are unhelpful.  Based on what yo said I drew this conclusion.  This is what you said:

Adrian Palme said:

The shortcut CTRL+Z stops working when I open multiple files in Studio 2019. Again. And again.

At this point all I know is you open multiple files.  I have no idea what you are trying to undo.  Then you said this in the same post:

Adrian Palme said:

In the "old version" this bug could be temporarily fixed by copying a word into the concordance search field and providing the search. Then it worked again for while.

Given running a concordance doesn't actually change anything I clearly incorrectly assumed you must be making a change you need to undo and used a search and replace to do it.

If you actually told me and gave me the steps I wouldn't have to guess!

Adrian Palme said:

It happened right now. I have changed something in the text (first screen shot) and you can see in the second screen shot, that the undo function is gray = not active. And the shortcut CTRL+Z does not work too. In this moment 2 files from 2 different projects are opened.

This is possibly quite interesting.  You seem to have activated the Alt keys and this would most likely prevent Ctrl+Z from working as well as any other shortcut.  Can you try and note if this is what happens each time this fails for you?

I'll come back to you on the support tickets after discussing this with support.

Paul said:

I have no idea what you are trying to undo.

Usually people want to UNDO, what they have done. In an editor like SDL Studio it is e.g. writing, inserting tags, inserting TB entries etc. Just all the normal actions you do in an editor. All the actions, that should normally be undone with "UNDO".

Paul said:

If you actually told me and gave me the steps I wouldn't have to guess!

Don´t guess, just read. I wrote it clearly:

Adrian Palme said:

In the "old version" this bug could be temporarily fixed by copying a word into the concordance search field and providing the search. Then it worked again for while.

But as I say, this is already history. In the current version (SR2) I have to reopen the file or to restart Studio to fix the problem (for a while).

Paul said:

You seem to have activated the Alt keys

NO. Alt has been activated when I pushed "Alt+PrtScn" to make the screenshot. 

But even if ALT were activated, the UNDO function (the button) would have to be active. As you can see here:

Come on Adrian... you should know by now that things are not this simple.  This is simply not enough:

Adrian Palme said:

Usually people want to UNDO, what they have done. In an editor like SDL Studio it is e.g. writing, inserting tags, inserting TB entries etc. Just all the normal actions you do in an editor. All the actions, that should normally be undone with "UNDO".

This is working fine for me.  So on this basis we'll never fix anything.  I don't see anyone else complaining about the undo the way you are and you are not helping me to narrow this down at all to some specific action, or interference, that might be triggerring this.  It could easily be caused by something you have running on your machine and we'll never be able to reproduce it.

Try paying close attention to what you last did when the undo failed.  Perhaps there is something you just didn't notice before but actually helps you to reproduce the problem.

You could also provide me with your Studio logs after this happens.  Maybe we'll get lucky and find something in  there.

Thanks for your honesty Paul.

I think it might be a good idea for you guys at SDL to yourselves test which shortcuts are dead (and have been for years). Then, if you don't foresee being able to fix them in the short term (which I fully understand btw), please god: at least (temporarily) remove any mention of them in the UI and help docs, as it is extremely frustrating to keep running into things that just don't work. It's less depressing if the user isn't told about them to begin with, as you can't miss what you don't know. 

All in all though, I must admit that I am using Studio more and more lately as it is very snappy (in general) when compared to e.g. memoQ, which (although an excellent tool) has just gotten too slow over the years. Scrolling through the grid in memoQ 9.2 makes me want to die screaming.

Michael