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I was trying to correct a broken link in an old answer of mine on Stack Overflow, and really struggled until I realised that it was in Rich Text mode. (When did that happen? Not been very active on SO for a few weeks).

Problems encountered include:

  1. Selecting the link text (multi-word) was in the first instance difficult, the edit link box appeared immediately obscuring the text I was trying to select so I could not see what I was selecting.

  2. During the attempt to select the text the line-wrapping kept changing, presenting a moving target for the selection end-point.

  3. On clicking the edit "pencil" icon, the link text box was pre-populated with a single (apparently random) word from the multi-word selection; not the whole selection.

  4. Pasting in the URL and saving the change did not save the change, the URL remained unchanged.

Anyhow I switched to "Markdown with Preview" mode and now I am back in Kansas. Thankfully this selection appears to be persistent.

Interesting that this "feature" has not been applied to Meta (at time of writing).

Since this is supposed to be a question rather then simply an observation, is it just me?

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  • 4
    Welcome to Meta SE. I believe you're likely using the new "Stacks Editor". In particular, this Stacks Editor development and testing SO meta post states "Today, March 6, 2025, we will enable the Stacks Editor for all users answering questions on Stack Overflow, except for the tags that may get value from Stack Snippets ...". However, there's an opt-out, as explained later in that post. To confirm, you may wish to use that "Disable new editor" option to see whether or not you get back to the previous editor you were using.
    – John Omielan
    Commented Mar 15 at 23:40
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    Thanks @JohnOmielan - By "Anyhow I switched to "Markdown with Preview" mode and now I am back in Kansas. _" I mean it i back to normal (Wizard of Oz reference in case that was not clear), but yes I have essentially opted out, but was rather more interested in why the implementation is so poor and unusable. Making it the default in that state is an issue IMO. It is particularly bad on a phone, where in addition to the above issues, when you zoom in so you can select the _tiny "pencil" icon, it disappears off the right of the edit window and cannot be accessed at all.
    – Clifford
    Commented Mar 16 at 18:41

1 Answer 1

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We've made a few tweaks to the link editor popup that should address these issues:

  • it now only appears when your selection is entirely within a link, not when your entire selection simply contains a link somewhere

  • it's fixed to the midpoint of the link, not where your cursor is

That should stop the link editor popup appearing when it's not expected, and it should prevent it jumping around as your selection changes.

In addition, editing the link now edits the whole link, not just the part of it you selected (looking at the revision you edited, I think your issue #4 is caused by #3 - your change only affected part of your selected link text).

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  • Works for me. Nice work.
    – Clifford
    Commented Mar 25 at 21:36

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