Should Distraction Free mode have Edit and Select modes?

[richtabor]

Much of the UI has been pared back for Distraction Free mode. Is it necessary to have the Edit and Select mode controls available?

[jasmussen]

Good ticket. Mainly on a meta level, it surfaces an issue around that tooling, which I think is worth discussing moreso than whether it's available in distraction free mode. If we make the key behaviors (letting keyboard users select block 10 in 10 keypresses, and employing parent-first selection for the mouse) intuitive enough, we can potentially make the dropdown invisible in distraction free. As is, however, neither of the main features of select mode are intuitive or obvious. To me the best part of select mode is the ability to press Esc then Del to delete an entire paragraph block, and that seems mostly a critique of how hard it is to delete blocks in general.

The main problem IMO is that select mode reserves the Esc key for invokation, which is such a high value shortcut that we should use it for deselect. I'd love to find a different keyboard shortcut for it — maybe holding down ⌘? If we did this, it might also solve both #48904 and #47172.

[draganescu]

Distraction free mode should be allowed in any interaction model I think. It's in the name you can write distraction free or you can design distraction free. On the other hand I am not sure about the toggle itself. Maybe switching interaction models should only work through the command palette in DFM?