Something different: I am so happy about `BasicTextField2`. Thanks to everyone who worked on it :cla...

# compose-android

[Helen Fu]

Something different: I am so happy about BasicTextField2. Thanks to everyone who worked on it 👏. I understand writing a text field is probably not glamorous work but the difference between this and the previous version are night and day. I can't tell you how happy I am having written an incredibly complex VisualTransformation for something that should have been simple previously then having to go back to EditText because not everything was supported.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

What were you using the visual transformation for? Are you using OutputTransformation on btf2?

[Helen Fu]

I will be 😅 that's the plan. I haven't written it yet but not having to count indices seems nicer. I have used InputTransformation so far to capture some user input but will probably use OutputTransformation for styling mention text (that's what I wrote my previous VisualTransformation for)

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

So OutputTransformation doesn’t currently support style annotations, but it’s on the roadmap

[Helen Fu]

oops then maybe I jumped the gun too soon. When should we expect the style annotations?

[Helen Fu]

since TextFieldValue takes in an AnnotatedString, I can probably make what I need work without OutputTransformation through an edit to the annotated string. Probably fine for my use case.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

BTF2 doesn’t use TextFieldValue, OutputTransformation uses the new TextFieldBuffer API which doesn’t support annotations yet.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

i can’t give you a specific ETA with confidence, but it’s high on our list of things to support after the core functionality is out the door

[Helen Fu]

oof maybe I need to revert my change 😅 ooooooops

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

Sorry. Since BTF never properly supported styling anyway, we didn’t think it would be a regression if btf2 didn’t right away either

[Helen Fu]

BasicTextField did support TextFieldValue though, so it could render stylized text, right? I'm not super worried about the support though, no need to apologize. I can always go back to using EditText until BasicTextField2 is ready.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

No, it used AnnotatedStrings in the API because support was planned, but it never actually supported it

[Carson Holzheimer]

OG BasicTextField does support some aspects of AnnotatedString at least