When typing on a computer, the bit of the user interface that receives the text you're typing is said to have 'focus'. This could be a word processor page, a Halfbakery annotation box, a search box, an email window, or something else. Sometimes you have to click on a bit of the screen to move focus around. If there is nothing on the screen with the current focus, then the text you're typing is lost and doesn't go anywhere. This happens a lot to people like me who can't really type and so have to look at the keyboard. I can type a whole sentence and then look up and discover that the document I thought had focus doesn't, and I now have to retype all that stuff.

This idea proposes two potential improved ways to handle what happens when a user types and there isn't a user interface object with the current keyboard focus.

1) If there is nothing to receive the text being typed, it should appear right in the middle of the screen and fall gently like autumn leaves to form a jumbled pile at the bottom of the screen. If you want to retrieve any of this text you can pick it up with the mouse and drag it to the window that you thought you were typing in. As time passes any remaining text left at the bottom of the screen is blown away by a simulated wind.

2) Again, if there is no destination for what you're typing on the keyboard, the keyboard itself should resist your typing by refusing to allow the keys to be pressed. This would require some communication of whether the current keyboard focus was defined to be passed to the keyboard, and for the keyboard to have tiny mechanisms in each key to stop it being pressed but this is just technology, and an easily solved problem.
-- hippo, Aug 09 2023

Text_20Catcher [hippo, Aug 09 2023]

This has been done on here before, some kind of buffer that captures everything you type without focus, and then gives you the option to find an entry point and dump it all there. No idea who invented it or what they called it or if it still exists on here but I definitely remember reading about it.
-- pocmloc, Aug 09 2023


[pocmloc] Interesting! I just did a quick search and found the linked idea, which is different from this, but it does show that I thought of at least part of this idea in 2010 and wrote an annotation about it
-- hippo, Aug 09 2023



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