Puzzling quick entry box behavior

[fragar]

I use the following steps very frequently to enter new actions into OmniFocus 3 on the Mac:

1. Press Alt-Control-Space to bring up the quick entry box.
2. Type the title of the new action.
3. Press tab to move the focus to the next field, which is the project field.
4. Type the first few letters of the project I want to assign.
5. Press tab to auto-complete the project name and move the focus to the next field, which is the tags field.
6. Type the first few letters of the tag I want to assign.
7. Press tab to auto-complete the tag name and move the focus to the next field, which is the defer date field.
8. Press return to indicate that the entry is done.

At this point, one of two things happens:

1. Sometimes, the entry becomes shaded in a light blue and I can then immediately press enter again to add the action to my database and dismiss the quick entry box.

Screenshot:

2. Sometimes, the entry becomes shaded in a light gray. At that point, pressing enter again is rejected with a beep. Instead, I must press tab, in which case the quick entry box becomes shaded in light blue and I can finally press enter to add the action to my database and dismiss the entry box.

Screenshot after pressing the first “enter”:

Screenshot after pressing “tab”:

I can’t figure out when #1 happens and when #2 does, but it’s consistent for any project/tag combination. That is, in the above examples, any action which was assigned to project “OmniFocus” and tag “Do” was consistently giving me behavior #1 while any action which was assigned to project “OmniFocus” and tag “Clean Up” was consistently giving me behavior #2.

Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening?

[fragar]

Follow up:

As it turns out, I can get consistent and efficient behavior by pressing enter instead of tab in step 7. This auto-completes the tag name and moves the focus to where another tag could be assigned rather than to the defer field. After that, pressing enter again (as in step 8) always leads to the blue shaded box, and pressing enter a third time always enters the action into my database and closes the quick entry box.

This is also a better key combination to put into muscle memory since many of my actions do have multiple tags and very few have defer dates.

This solves the problem, although I’d still be curious to understand what the gray shaded quick entry box means and why it appears in some situations but not others.

[huyquangg97]

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

[tekl]

Hi @fragar! Thanks for the detailed steps and screenshots — they’re very useful in looking at this problem.

The gray highlight happens in all OmniFocus outlines when there’s a selection, but the app is not the frontmost, “active” app on your Mac. You can see the same effect by selecting an item in the main OmniFocus window, then activating another app like Safari, for instance. For some reason, it appears the Quick Entry window is losing focus after you press Return in step 8.

If you haven’t already, would you mind sending in these steps — or even just a link to this forum thread — to our Support team via email? We can get it logged as a bug and do some more investigation that way.

Thanks for using OmniFocus!

[fragar]

Sure, I’ll email your support team.

I’ve noticed that the focus is lost after step 8 whenever the contents of the bottom line of the fluid-style quick entry box after step 7 are long enough to concatenate some of the remaining placeholders.

For example, if after step 7 we have:

Then after step 8 everything is ok:

If we use a longer context name so that the “no due date” text is truncated into a small dots diagram, then after step 7 we have:

And after step 8 we lose the focus:

If we widen the quick entry box and re-run the previous example, then again we have enough space for the “no due date” text:

And after step 8 everything is again ok:

I’ve tried a number of other permutations and the above pattern always holds. Whenever “no due date” is displayed after step 7, the light blue box appears after step 8. Whenever the dots diagram is displayed after step 7, the gray box appears after step 8.