Changes to rich-text-input

[Torquai]

So I was playing around with the rich text this weekend and I thought of a couple of improvements it could use.

Keep in mind that if you just type in some text, it will have the default color White if station in enabled, and Red if the station is disabled.

But if you override color with for example "[color≈blue] Station" the name will stay blue regardless of enabled/disabled.
This led me to use for example "X [color≈blue] Station", meaning I could see the color of the X if station was working or not.

So I ended up on discord trying to find a way to reset the color because I wanted to have the X at the end, and we found that using "[color≈blue]station[/color] X" but without a cheatsheet for this, its not really intuitive.

My suggestion is like this, some of it might be overkill, but some of it should be easy.

* easy: Have an extra, optional, UI to toggle when entering text. A UI that has a searchable list of possibilities, showing colors and items we can link in, as well as other possibilities.
* easy: The abovementioned UI should have two textboxes with the text, one with markup, and one without. Making it easier to work with.
* complex: Status based text based on signals. Like

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"[if T > 0]Train is at station[endif][if T = 0]Station is free of trains[endif]"

where T is a signal read from the train id with switch between two different names if a train is docked or not. Maybe even add the possibility to combine longer texts with several options.
* complex: Rich text being able to show signals and counts. Like

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"This station has [signal]copper-plate[/signal] copper plates and [signal]everything[/signal] items"

will show "This station has 23963 copper plates and 38472 items".

I have some more clear pictures in my mind and will be happy to share if this seems interesting.

[Dev-iL]

+1.

I would love to have some "emoji-like" button near text fields that would allow easy picking of entities to add to text. I mostly link to images of items and not the items themselves (i.e.

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[img=item/foo-bar-baz]

), so shift-clicking an item/recipe when the chat is open is not useful to me. I'm finding it a major inconvenience having to {open a browser, go to the wiki, search for the entity or the Data.raw page, just to} find the internal name of an item so that it can be inserted into chat.

A simpler alternative would be to add some hotkey combination that only inserts the image of an item and not a link (but this has the downside of only making available items/technologies linkable).

[ssilk]

Reminds me to the times when I managed a bulletin board system in my youth. The BBS had a similar system to change colors, write internal variables, etc. and each version they extended this with new features.
And suddenly it was a fully programmable language with IF, GOTO and much more.

And users came and tried to hack our BBS and found ways to overgo the authentication and much more uglier things until we need to forbid the usage of this special codes...

What I want to say: why not use
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/train-station-overview

[Dev-iL]

What I want to say: why not use <some mod>

For me the answer is simple - I need this functionality in a non-modded MP game, otherwise I would probably have used LuziferSenpai's "Rich Text Helper"
.

<Also, something about the slippery slope fallacy>

[ssilk]

<Also, something about the slippery slope fallacy>

No , I said because A happened in the past and B is similar to A in many aspects it might be that B will end similar to A.