Let the user edit a multiline text in situ (edit "in place")

Question

If the node contains long text (e.g. a small paragraph), it becomes very difficult to edit it.

If we press F2  (or double-click on the node), the entire paragraph gets converted to a single line, and the right part of that line is often outside the frame of the GUI!

If we try to move the cursor to the part, we expect the text to scroll to the left, so that the cursor remains visible all the time. Or we expect the GUI to extend to the right, to show the whole sentence till the end.

But this does not happen at all. Instead, the cursor simply runs out of the screen (exits from the right edge of the GUI).

The only way to reach the text outside the GUI is to zoom out so much that the entire line becomes visible again. But at this zoom, you cannot read anything. So it becomes impossible to edit the text at this zoom factor.

I tried to cheat the system by entering the Edit mode, zooming out, placing my cursor in the right side of the edited text and then zooming in. As soon as I try to zoom it, yEd exits the Edit mode immediately.

This is extremely clumsy.

Desired:

Allow the multi-line text to be edited "in place" (in situ). In other words, in Edit mode, the text should not get converted into a single line: The cursor should just run down from one line to another, and let the user make edits there.

Answer 1

yEd's label editor does not convert multi-line text into a single line. If the text is displayed as multiple lines when not being edited but as single line when edited, then your text is indeed a single line but your are using the "Cropping" label configuration that performs automatic text wrapping!

That said, yEd's inline text editor is not intended for editing long lines of text.
If you need to do that, use either the properties dialog or the properties view for editing text. Especially the properties view in yEd's lower right corner is well-suited for this use case because if you click into the "Text" value field, it will display a small button labeled "..." which will open a dedicated text editing component for editing multiple or long lines of text.

Comments

Yes, that's correct: I am using the "Cropping" feature to wrap a long line of text.

BTW in my case, there is a twist, which I want to share for the other users:

My use case was to create an argument map from a court order.
(I hope to share the final diagram as case study at the forum)

Since yEd does not have an Argument Map palette, I borrowed a two-box node from the Entity Relationship palette, and used it as argument node, as follows:

The node has a "label" compartment at top, and a text compartment at bottom. So in the top half, I enter the litigant's name, and reference paragraph number from the court order. In the bottom half, I enter the actual argument (claim).

Now, if the node has two compartments, the Properties box actually shows me text only from the "Label" compartment!

It does not have another field to show the text from the bottom compartment.

To access that text, I had to double-click on the bottom half of the node, and then look at the Properties view. Now the Properties View shows the text in the bottom compartment only. When I click on the text, a free-floating text-editor box pops up. I can edit and save the text.