Factorio Forums

When I type [item=iron-plate] into a text box or field in game, it gets converted to the iron plate icon. If what I meant to type was [item=iron-plate,quality=rare], I might realize my error and press backspace... but then the whole icon is gone and I have to type the whole thing again.

I'd like to have a way to convert an icon back to text. Maybe double clicking on the icon. Maybe shift+backspace with the cursor to the right of the icon (or shift+delete with the cursor to the left). Maybe just backspace, although that would break UX that players are used to now.

Google Docs and MS Word use ctrl+z undo automatic conversion of things, and that would be useful here, but it wouldn't be sufficient because my actual use case is to come back much later and edit the icon to represent a different quality or item.

Yes, it would be great if backspace deleted the ] instead of the whole icon, as I often just write stuff in plain text instead of using the picker (especially as the picker has many missing icons)

Emacs does this kind of thing in kind of a neat way: When the cursor is outside of the "special syntax" item, it is rendered, if the cursor moves inside it, it shows the raw source string.

But I imagine that kind of change would be quite major for the text system in Factorio so I don't suspect it would be implemented anytime soon, if at all.

That would actually be pretty cool, but I agree it's a much bigger ask.