Allow TextArea API edits to defer batching

[tconbeer]

Right now the TextArea's undo behavior is defined by a set of heuristics to determine whether or not edits should be batched together:

textual/src/textual/document/_history.py

Lines 57 to 71 in 787331e

	A new batch/checkpoint is created when:
	- The undo stack is empty.
	- The checkpoint timer expires.
	- The maximum number of characters permitted in a checkpoint is reached.
	- A redo is performed (we should not add new edits to a batch that has been redone).
	- The programmer has requested a new batch via a call to `force_new_batch`.
	- e.g. the TextArea widget may call this method in some circumstances.
	- Clicking to move the cursor elsewhere in the document should create a new batch.
	- Movement of the cursor via a keyboard action that is NOT an edit.
	- Blurring the TextArea creates a new checkpoint.
	- The current edit involves a deletion/replacement and the previous edit did not.
	- The current edit is a pure insertion and the previous edit was not.
	- The edit involves insertion or deletion of one or more newline characters.
	- An edit which inserts more than a single character (a paste) gets an isolated batch.

There is an API to force a new batch, but not the opposite: I would like to be able to batch edits together into a single undo.

For example, in Harlequin, I support ctrl+/ to toggle a comment marker at the start of each selected line. I currently achieve this by looping over the selected lines and calling TextArea.insert() or TextArea.delete().

Deleting comments currently works as expected - a user presses ctrl+/ to delete comments, and they can undo that delete action with a single ctrl+z.

However, inserting comments doesn't work as well. Since I'm inserting more than one character (the comment marker(s) and a single space), TextArea creates an undo batch for each line that is edited. Pressing ctrl+z undoes a single line's comments at a time. Counter-intuitively, if I break these inserts into a single character (to hack the current heuristic), I can get the behavior I want (mostly, as long as I'm inserting fewer than 100 characters).

I'd prefer an API to defer undo batching. That could be via a kwarg on TextArea.insert() (and other methods) or by one or more calls to TextArea.history (an EditHistory), like TextArea.history.defer_batching() followed by TextArea.history.checkpoint(). Or as a context manager:

class MyTextArea(TextArea):
    def action_toggle_comments(self) -> None:
        ...
        with self.history.defer_batching():
            for line in lines:
                self.insert(...)

[github-actions[bot]]

Thank you for your issue. Give us a little time to review it.

PS. You might want to check the FAQ if you haven't done so already.

This is an automated reply, generated by FAQtory

[darrenburns]

Good idea 👍

With the approach you suggested, I'm unsure what happens after the context manager exits - does it immediately put everything within into its own batch, or does it wait until the heuristic triggers a new batch?

I wonder if a context manager called batch which groups everything within the context into a single batch would work?

[tconbeer]

Yeah, I was thinking it would create a batch on exit. Kind of like begin/commit for database libs.