Clear cursor state in block deletion

[rachel-fenichel]

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Problem

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Request

If the block that is deleted has a cursor pointing to it (at the workspace level), tell the cursor to clear itself from the block's dispose function.

Alternatives considered

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Additional context

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[maribethb]

In the keyboard nav demo, the behavior is that when you delete a block with the delete key, the cursor goes to the workspace or connection in the place where the block used to be. is this not the desired behavior anymore? what even happens if there is no current node? do you have to renavigate the entire block tree again? what if you want to delete a stack of six blocks? you'd have to navigate to the previous location a bunch which seems pretty annoying

[maribethb]

Just chatted with Rachel and she confirmed that we should copy the current behavior from the experiment, and not just set it to null

[BenHenning]

I'm curious how this changes now that cursor has nearly no state. If dispose properly cleans up an actively focused DOM element, the browser should send a focus event to document.body which would clear the current focused node (and result in cursor no longer having an active node on the next interaction with it).

[maribethb]

But when you delete a block, we should put focus somewhere sensible instead of nowhere. That’s what this issue is tracking, whether it’s updating the cursor or the focus system.

[BenHenning]

But when you delete a block, we should put focus somewhere sensible instead of nowhere. That’s what this issue is tracking, whether it’s updating the cursor or the focus system.

That is a very good point, and something I completely missed. :)

FWIW if there's an easy hook-in place for deletion, a reasonable solution for this might be to add a delayed focusTree call for workspace. The delayed approach is so that the focus manager has time to clear focus from the dispose call and thus will revert back to its "find a good candidate to focus" rather than the workspace root. If we want to workspace root, instead, we could just focusNode the root directly without a delay.