Inserting Tabs?

I tried to insert TAB characters into a draft, and found “Keyboard Basic” to contain this.

But …

This seems to shift the indentation of the whole line, not insert a TAB character.

Anything i am doing wrong here?

It seems, that symbol just is NOT a TAB :slight_smile:
Anywhere else?

I don’t see a tab key in my keyboard basic.

I guess you have actually been using indent.

Try linking this up this action to one of your keyboards.

Hope that helps.

Yessss :smile:

Now i can insert Tabs, it seems.

And yes, this symbol looks much more like a TAB.
I did not look at the description, as i just was changing the keyboard row, sorry.

I directly found an issue with TABs, as it seems. Opening in “Issues”.

I did choose a tab symbol for it specifically :wink: , but you can obviously choose any available symbol to use for a keyboard key.

Absolutely no need to apologise. We all misread things, make assumptions, etc. In the end, as long as you get where you need to go, then everything’s good :smiley:

Besides, there may well be others now or in the future who encounter this same situation and be able to draw on your experience.

Yep, thanks.

I think, I came to the idea that this should be a TAB as it was the only similar thing in any of the “Keyboard” or “Basic” Action Directories.

I never came to the idea that a TAB is such an uncommon and unexpected thing :smile:

In regards to being ‘uncommon’, let’s just say that a tab character is tricky to find on an Apple iOS keyboard and perhaps not so tricky on others…

For what it’s worth, I actually use a TextExpander snippet* most commonly for tabs in Drafts when I’m not using an external keyboard; though I did create a tab action for the extended keyboard row for when I’m working with text that requires a lot of tabbing.

* Note I do use a TextExpander subscription to support this (I use it cross device and cross platform so definitely worth it for me) and unfortunately iOS’s built in text replacement functionality balks at just a tab as text to insert as it sees it as just whitespace and considers that invalid.

Ah, very interesting, thanks!

Cross-Platform means Apple, right? :wink:

I am a Window man … could not warm up with Macs …
But i love iPad :blush:

Cannot get directly the next subscription, for TextExpander.
As i said … this is a catastrophe and all of you will learn that soon, when nothing is possible anymore without subscriptions! I am horryfied …

No cross platform in this case meaning iOS, MacOS and Windows for my TextExpander use. I’m fairly agnostic overall, but I’m a daily user of Windows and iOS at work with occasional Android and Linux. At home, it’s mainly MacOS and iOS with again some Windows, Android and Linux thrown in for good measure. But I’ve worked with more platforms than that over my career so quite honestly even if it has just a command prompt I’m usually fine.

We’ll have to agree to disagree in regards to the subscriptions base. But for those apps & services I get good value from, I’m happy to support them so they don’t just disappear or get left to ‘rot on the vine’ so to speak as has happened for quite a few of my favoured iOS apps over the years.

Anyway, that ‘subscription or not’ conversation’s been done to death in a number of places so I’ll take my leave of further discussion on that one here.

Yes, you are right, but when you post about “subscriptions are OK to support importand software”, i need to add at least that there is a better solution:

Pay for every major new version and drop support for the older versions!

Just to let a casual reader not think that subscriptions are without alternative.

I´m out too

Thanks a bunch!!!

Is there a way to get a TAB into a URL? I use %20 to add a space, but I actually in some cases want a tab instead. Is that possible?

Yes.%09 is a tab.

You can pretty much URL encode any character.

E.g. Lookup resource
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

Thanks, I assumed that was the case, but I didn’t know what the codes are called, and I didn’t know where to look it up! Is there a directory somewhere?

You didn’t tap on the link did you? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

:wink:

Hah, of course not! As soon as I got the %09, I went off to fix my problem! So thanks for sending me the reference as well as the answer to my question!

Drafts can do encoding for you as well by wrapping text in {{ }} in a template. Mind you, it’s not easy to type a tab character on iOS if you don’t have an external keyboard, but in general, if you are constructing URLs in action steps, it’s a good idea to just get in the habit of wrapping an parameters you manually input in the double curly braces, because there are a lot of other now common characters that need to be encoded for URLs. Like:

scheme://action?param={{My Text Param}}
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I tried this once, and it didn’t work, undoubtedly because I didn’t fully understand, and I still don’t.

Once I got the %09, I created my URL.

How would I do that the way you are suggesting?

By the way I love the way Drafts has a separate space for tags, and I wish Bear would do that. Their tags are always in the way!

How do I post a URL here? I keep getting an error message.

Just pasting the URL into your post should work just fine.

It would also be useful to share the detail of what you are doing and how you are doing it. E.g. Is the URL being embedded as text of Markdown in a draft or is it being opened by drafts as part of an action?

It is also useful to check/share the contents of the log if it is a draft action encountering an error.

Here is my callback URL, and you will find the %09 in there somewhat near the end.

Hmmm, when I paste it in, I get an error message. So I have added it as an image.

We’ll see how that works.

Any chance your draft content needs URL encoding too?

Try putting the draft tag in double curly braces.

{{[[draft]]}}

See Templates and Tags documentation.

List button may also need the same. It depends on what it contains, but there’s certainly no harm in encoding it

The colon in your time would probably be okay, but maybe wrap that tag in double braces too just to be sure.