Playgrounds scroll while typing. Anyone else or just me?

I don't know if this is a bug (though I highly doubt it's a feature) or what, but I find this behavior in XCode Playgrounds to be really annoying: whenever I start typing something (other than operator symbols, it seems) the screen scrolls up by a line, meaning the line I'm typing on moves down. It happens whenever I start to type any text that is not a symbol (except for @ and $). Which means if I'm typing a lot on a line, or just typing a lot continuously, then whatever I'm typing will scroll down off the screen in any case where I'm not a the top of that page. This might be easier to show than explain, so here's a quick video of what I'm talking about using the Enumerations Playground lab from the App Development with Swift course:


https://youtu.be/JFWFFR8cYrM


If this is intentional behavior or something caused by my set up, then I'd really like to know how to make it stop. If it's a bug, then I guess I should submit it. However, I wanted to check in and see if it's just me. Unfortunately my Google-Fu seems to be failing me when searching to see if anyone else is having an issue like this, or perhaps it's just not widespread.


FWIW, I'm running the latest Xcode 10.2.1 (10E1001) on a mid-2014 MacBook Pro 13" Retina with the latest Mojave 10.14.4.


Any thoughts or advice would be most welcome. I'm pretty new here as well as to iOS development and modern coding in general, so my apologies if this is in the wrong spot or if I was unable to successfully search for the answer if it has already been addressed.
Cheers,
Alex

Replies

This might be easier to show than explain, so here's a quick video of what I'm talking about

Wow, that’s pretty crazy. I’ve never experienced anything like that before.

using the Enumerations Playground lab from the App Development with Swift course

Can you post a link to that playground so that I can try out exactly what you were doing? [The link will require moderation, but I can take care of that.]

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!”
Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware

let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@apple.com"

Can confirm. Happens very often since last major upd. And very annoying.

It does not depend on playgrounds content. At least for me.

But (maybe?) happens more if you are using Rendered Markup thingy. Not sure tho.

I can also confirm that this annoying scrolling happens, using Xcode 10.2.1 on macOS 10.14.5.


The playgrounds in question are downloaded as part of the "student materials" for the Apple book "Everyone Can Code: App Development with Swift (Swift 4 Edition)". There is a link on page 5 to download the student materials (the link is https://education-static.apple.com/app-dev-swift/v2.6/resources/student.zip).


The downloaded zip file expands to a folder called "Student Resources". The playground that the original question refers to is: Student Resources/3 - Navigation and Workflows/5 - Enumerations/lab/Lab - Enumerations.playground

Also, if it's any help, it seems to me that the unwanted scrolling is linked to when the autocomplete box appears and disappears.

Thanks for an explanation of how to reproduce the problem. With that I see it as well. Gosh, that’s annoying. I don’t have any advice here other than that this is clearly a bug and I’d appreciate you filing a bug report about it.

Please post your bug number, just for the record.

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!”
Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware

let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@apple.com"

Thanks Quinn. Reported as bug 51256228.

I observe it only when rendered Markup ON

Yes, that's a good point. If you do Editor->Show Raw Markup then the scrolling problem doesn't happen. I guess the buy is something to do with the text rendering, line spacing, etc. of the Markup.

Yikes! Sorry I haven't been paying much attention to this thread since I posted it. I thought I'd receive some kind of notification when replies were posted. 😟
Big thank you to paul2000 for coming in and responding with the same problem. Cheers! 🙂

If you have access to the Xcode 11 beta seed, please re-run your tests there. My testing indicates that it has resolved the issue.

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!”
Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware

let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@apple.com"

Confirmed. This bug no longer seems to occur in the Xcode 11 beta. Thanks.

I guess this question is a little off topic, but not worth a new thread: I'm very new to programming and stuff, as indicated by the fact that I'm working my way through the "App Development with Swift" iBook; apart from the normal caveat of "It's a beta, so there may be bugs", should I have any worries about using XCode 11 beta as I continue to work through the course (i.e. things working differently so perhaps following examples in the book won't work; I've already run into small examples of this due the book not being completely updated regarding some changes between Swift 3 and Swift 4)? Or should I be pretty much fine for the most part?
Anyway, thank you for your attention in the matter of the annoying scrolling while typing bug; glad to see it has been fixed for XCode 11. Cheers. 🙂

Or should I be pretty much fine for the most part?

Probably, but my recommendation is that you use the Xcode version that the tutorial was designed for. There is a small amount of drift over time — some in Swift, but even more in Apple’s SDKs — and, as someone who’s just getting started, it’s hard to know whether a problem you’ve encountered is your bug, a bug in the tutorial, or just an example of this drift. If you use the version of Xcode associated with the tutorial, you can rule out the last case.

Keep in mind that you can have multiple versions of Xcode installed (if you have the disk space), and so you can use Xcode 11 beta for up-to-date testing, Xcode 10.2.1 for production work, and whatever older version of Xcode is needed by your tutorial.

Current I have the following installed on my main Mac:

  • Xcode 8.3.3
  • Xcode 9.4
  • Xcode 10.2
  • Xcode 10.2.1
  • Xcode 11.0b1

And that’s a culled list, because I had to delete a bunch of older versions to free up space for all the goodies we released at WWDC.

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!”
Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware

let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@apple.com"

When learning, I always find it better to have the lesson and the tool on par (as long as noe of them is obviously obsolete). Otherwise you constantly ask: is it me or the environment.