Zulip's drafts behavior made me think it discarded text when I pressed ESC by accident

To Reproduce

1. Open Zulip Desktop on Windows
2. Start composing a very long detailed reply to someone’s question
3. Attempt to press the backtick key (`) to mark up some code, but accidentally press the ESC key which is adjacent to it on your keyboard

Expected behavior I can easily fix my mistake and type the backtick key (`) that I intended.

Actual behavior My editor window instantly disappears. Whatever I was writing seems to have been deleted. I made this mistake many times before finally realizing that I didn’t actually need to rewrite everything from scratch – the text is being saved as a “draft” which can be restored.

This is perhaps the designed behavior. But for a new user it is counterintuitive (and infuriating, if you believe your text was deleted).

Out of curiosity, I compared with some other popular chat clients:

• Slack Pressing ESC does nothing
• Teams Pressing ESC does nothing
• Telegram Pressing ESC closes the entire thread, but if you reopen the thread, your half-written text is still visible in the editor
• Wire Pressing ESC does nothing
• Discord Pressing ESC does nothing

So, although Zulip could maybe show a more prominent warning when saving a draft, perhaps the best solution is for ESC to simply do nothing. To some extent, the definition of “intuitive” is “whatever most apps do.”

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• Operating System: Windows 10
• Zulip Desktop Version: 5.6.0

[timabbott]

I just wanted to update this thread that in Zulip 4.0, we replaced the notification that a draft was saved, which was previously very hard to see, with a tooltip: 6a374d6d28af07e18d1600f01b64892bac24f0a2.

I’m not going to close this issue, since there’s more we can do here and also we don’t have clear evidence that the new indicator isn’t also invisible to many users.

(The most likely change I’d like to do is to show details on drafts for the current recipient when the compose box is open)

[timabbott]

IMO having the composebox automatically load the most recent draft for the narrow you’re in is a good solution here. I don’t see a case where that could be the wrong thing to do, at least.

I can see various cases – e.g. a very common thing I do when in the middle of writing something long/complex is close the compose box with escape, compose and send a quick reply, and then restart working on my longer draft.