No way to exit a Tab in the Song Selection. Escape / Backspace send to main menu

[Travisrowe]

Actual behaviour

When Tabs are set to ON, and a tab is selected during the song selection process, the Escape / Backspace keys send the user to the main menu.

Expected behaviour

When Tabs are set to ON, and a tab is selected during the song selection process, the Escape / Backspace keys should back out of the selected tab to allow the user to select a different tab.

Steps to reproduce

1. Open the ultrastardx.exe
2. From the main menu, go to Tools > Options
3. Click on Game
4. Set Tabs to ON and Sorting to Artist
5. From the main menu, click Sing
6. Proceed to the Song Selection screen, then click on a tab
7. The Escape / Backspace keys now send you to the main menu. In fact, I can't find any way to exit a tab without going back into the settings and setting Tabs to OFF

Details

Provide some additional information:

• USDX version: v2024.10.0
• Operating System + version: Windows 11 Pro 64 bit

[Travisrowe]

Looking at /src/screens/UScreenSong.pas:1135, I wonder if the else case on line 1162 is ultimately being hit. Just spitballing.

[barbeque-squared]

The line above the one you're linking probably tells you all you need to know about tabs in general: //On Escape goto Cat-List Hack End

I've turned on tabs once and then immediately turned them off again for exactly the reason you describe, and then just kinda forgot that this is a 'feature'.

I'm going to be honest here: even with the linked code, I have very little motivation in fixing this. It's probably in USDX because the original SingStar has it kind of (I don't know? I've never played any of them myself), but unlike consoles USDX has a keyboard search. The tabs mostly appear to be there for people that can only use arrow keys? The few other times I've seen someone use it, they could have just used a playlist, Alt+letter, or the SongDirX= in the config.ini. There's an argument to be had that these are harder to access for new players or not as intuitive to find (though back when I was new to USDX I had no issue finding them).

Obviously if someone makes a good PR, it will still get merged.

[Travisrowe]

I was trying to find a good way to let guests sort of browse my library to find a song they want to sing. I thought it would be better to group by Artists, and they could arrow key through more quickly. I also considered making a "Favorites" playlist, but that's more subjective to my own biases than I'd like.

At any rate, I still like Tabs as a solution to my use case, so I wouldn't mind taking a look at this issue myself. Do you think I'm on the right track with that linked code, or do you have any other guidance on a place to look? I'll read up on how to contribute, and I'll see what I can find.

[Travisrowe]

So it turns out the issue is only there if Tabs are set to Off at startup. If config.ini has Tabs set to On, there's no issue. You could also just restart the game after setting Tabs to On in Tools > Options.

Issue maybe has something to do with using Ini.TabsAtStartup instead of just Ini.Tabs, but meh. A win is a win

[barbeque-squared]

It's technically still a bug. It's good that there's a workaround, but I never dived into the code to figure out what's going on here. It should stay open until there's an actual fix for this though.

[Travisrowe]

I have a fix for this, but for some reason I'm unable to push my feature branch to make a pull request. Do I need write permissions maybe?

[s09bQ5]

You can fork the repo and push the branch there. When you visit the repo here afterwards, it will ask you if you want to make a pull request for that branch.