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Forum Discussion
Txt files now open in preview mode instead of the Dropbox Text Editor directly
My files are created as plain .txt files. In the past they would open directly with the Dropbox Text Editor as I had selected the Dropbox Text Editor as the default in the phone app.
Now the files ...
Hi all,
I'm a product manager at Dropbox working on the mobile Previews experience. First off, sorry for the inconvenience that we've caused you re: your workflow. The original intent behind this change was to solve a complaint that users had around wanting to perform more Dropbox-related file actions like sharing - so defaulting to preview was intentional.
However, it seems like we introduced 2 new issues here:
1. We now default you to the Dropbox editor, and when you're in the Dropbox editor, there also a number of issues where pressing the edit button scrolls you back up to the top of the file, the font size is a bit different, etc.
2. We don't respect the default text editor that you use, so you have to click the 3 dots > Open with > the default editor everytime you want to edit a text file.
One solution we're thinking about is to still drop users into preview mode when opening a .txt file (to aid many users who do want to perform actions in Dropbox), but pressing the edit button would drop you into your default text editor. Would like to hear more feedback from you on this change before we make it.
Thank you for your input in making Dropbox better!
I don't understand. I want to be able to edit text files on any device using Dropbox, but I can't find a way to do it. Please post detailed instructions for editing text files!
For my convenience, I create files in Windows using Notepad or use a word processor (for spell check abilities), then paste the text into Notepad. Yes, other ways will work but that is how I do it.
Then in Notepad, Save the .txt file to a Dropbox folder.
Then when opening a .txt file in Dropbox on any platform, select "Use Dropbox Editor" to open the file. If you previously used another editor and it became the default, then you must change the default "Open With" function within Dropbox.
When I open a .txt file, there is no "Use Dropbox Editor" or any other way to open Notepad to edit the file, either on Android or Windows! It's a really really stupid Dropbox limitation.
So I don't understand the issues since some changes had been implemented (at least in the Android version). Now there is a small "edit" button in the lower left corner of the text file when opened in preview/read mode, pop that and the file opens in the editor mode and you can edit inside the app. It's still an additional step that is moderatley annoying, sure, but it's slightly less annoying than it used to be needing to go through a menu function to reach edit mode.
In windows I just navigate to the folder with explorer and open with whatever document processor you want (notepad/wordpad/Word/etc.)
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