Hey all

So often I see people getting confused with symbol boxes. Its current interface design is contrary to what most people are used to from other software. Every text entry that I can think of gives a visual cue to indicate keyboard input is expected. However, when you click symbol box, nothing happens, which is the confusing part and makes a lot of people think it's not working. Only when you start typing, it adds a temporary '...' suffix to the written input.

My suggestion is to slightly modify its UI design, so that it immediately shows '...' when clicking it, not only after typing the first key.

To describe the desired behavior more verbosely:

[symbol \

<mouse-click>

[...    \

<press key 'f'>

[f...   \

<press some more keys 'o' 'o'>

[foo... \

<press ENTER>

[foo    \   <- now content is output, disappearance of '...' indicates                new value is set

I strongly believe this small change would make Pd slightly less awkward to use for newcomers and for people using ready-made patches (a nd would give me a better feeling to suggest a solution with a plain Pd interface).

Roman