What are the risks of drag/drop and in which cases?

[repilo]

I understand that with Sigil 2.0.0 the drag/drop function in text editing has been disabled and that it can be re-enabled by a certain environment variable, although there are some risks in doing so.
This function is very useful for me, because I often edit the text (not just the css) to correct mistranslations or add my own footnotes that I edit on the fly, and it is often enough for me to change the order of the elements of a sentence (the Spanish language is very flexible in this).

In short, I have activated the environment variable SIGIL_ALLOW_CODEVIEW_DROP=1
but I would like to know more specifically what risks I am taking by doing so and in which cases. As I said, my movements are always of short fragments within the same sentence, and so far I haven't noticed anything happening to me.

[DiapDealer]

Unknown. It's unsupported.The risks are yours to figure out.

[Sarmat89]

A programming text editor that does not allow D&D is just absurd.

[Turtle91]

This one author that I read is a GREAT storyteller… but can’t figure out commas to save his life! When I clean his books I am constantly dragging commas to their proper position (in code view). This is a lot faster to do by drag-n-drop with a mouse than manually typing and deleting.

Is this the kind of drag-n-drop that is disabled, or are you only referring to dragging code from some OTHER app/window and dropping into code view??

[KevinH]

Drag and drop according to the official Qt docs was supposed to be disabled by default. Sigil has been around a long time, long before Qt supported drag and drop at all without crashing. So this functionality was never used or tested in Sigil's CodeView.

Then silently, without changing their official docs, Qt turned ON drag and drop by default but it still could cause crashing in Qt 5.12.x and even Qt 5.15x.

This crashing was finally reported to us, and since Sigil was never designed/tested to use drag and drop, we decided to revert to disabling it (as that was the original Qt default) as fixing internal Drag and Drop crashes deep in Qt are beyond our control.

So with an environment variable set, you can enable drag and drop again, but we will NOT be accepting bug reports related to drag and drop editing. Any backtrace or bug regarding drag and drop will be closed and any such bug reports should be directed directly to Qt as it is not something our code controls.

If you do not like that, you can of course use Sigil's OpenWith command to edit the xhtml file with whatever html/code editor you prefer.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

A programming text editor that does not allow D&D is just absurd.

Having been a professional programmer and a user of emacs for over 45 years, I disagree.

You are of course free to use a different epub editor or to use Sigil's OpenWith to use your own code editor.

[Turtle91]

I added the environmental variable (SIGIL_ALLOW_CODEVIEW_DROP=1) and all seems to work fine. Thank you!

[KevinH]

@Turtle91, @repilo
If it worked well for you in the past and never crashed, that should continue. But the risks are the same as prior versions of Sigil where it worked inadvertently. That said Qt 6.5.2 may be much more stable with drag and drop than earlier versions of Qt. (or much worse! - we just do not know)

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

A programming text editor that does not allow D&D is just absurd.

*yawn*

[jwes]

Originally Posted by repilo

I understand that with Sigil 2.0.0 the drag/drop function in text editing has been disabled and that it can be re-enabled by a certain environment variable, although there are some risks in doing so.
This function is very useful for me, because I often edit the text (not just the css) to correct mistranslations or add my own footnotes that I edit on the fly, and it is often enough for me to change the order of the elements of a sentence (the Spanish language is very flexible in this).

In short, I have activated the environment variable SIGIL_ALLOW_CODEVIEW_DROP=1
but I would like to know more specifically what risks I am taking by doing so and in which cases. As I said, my movements are always of short fragments within the same sentence, and so far I haven't noticed anything happening to me.

The three things that happened when I used select and drag:
1. Generally it worked.
2. Sometimes Sigil crashed
3. Somtimes it switched to a tab with my stylesheet and changed it.

[KevinH]

Which is why we disabled it in the first place as Qt's drag and drop editing has never been very stable, at least in Qt5.

[cavy]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

I added the environmental variable (SIGIL_ALLOW_CODEVIEW_DROP=1) and all seems to work fine. Thank you!

Please tell me where and how you added it. Because I am unable to achieve it.

[KevinH]

What platform? If Windows, just google how to set an environment variable in Windows.
If macOS and Linux you can set them in your login shell profile .bashrc, etc.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by cavy

Please tell me where and how you added it. Because I am unable to achieve it.

Welcome to MR!!

I use windows and just followed the directions posted here:

If you are on a different platform I would just try Mr. Google, or one of his cousins.


Cheers!

[Turtle91]

jinx