Ability to delete multiple rows (or act on multiple items in general)

[brandonzylstra]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

In most apps there is a way to perform an action on multiple items at once, but that does not appear to be the case at least when trying to delete multiple rows of a table. This makes it very tedious to do this:

blocknote_tedium.mp4

Describe the solution you'd like

1. Normal keyboard shortcuts should work on multiple items.
2. Selecting commands from menus should not remove the selection, but should instead allow the command to be applied to the entire selection.

As a bonus, it would be helpful if the menu also remembered the last command chosen, so that it could be positioned such that you can choose that command multiple times more easily. (In this case the position of the menu could have put the deletion command near the mouse cursor, making this much smoother.) I can open a separate issue for this more peripheral request, if you'd like.

[matthewlipski]

I think that in the case of tables, hitting backspace/cmd+backspace with a row/column of cells selected should just clear their content rather than outright removing the whole row/column, as this also seems to be what e.g. Notion and GDocs do.

But I definitely agree that there should be a way of deleting the rows/columns spanned by the selection with 1 click.

I also noticed that changing the type of multiple selected blocks works as expected when using the formatting toolbar dropdown, but not when using keyboard shortcuts.

It should also be possible to delete multiple blocks via the drag handle menu, especially since you can already drag multiple blocks using the drag handle.

[brandonzylstra]

Yes, you're right about the behavior of Google Docs, and I can see the argument for consistency.

But it would be very nice if there were a way to delete a line with the keyboard. I think the lack of keyboard support is a shortcoming in things like Google Spreadsheets. I find all UIs that force me to frequently use the mouse or trackpad to be noticeably less efficient than they could be. (More because of breaking my flow than because of a few extra seconds for each operation. It's the concentration rather than the time that is so precious.)

Since Google Spreadsheets doesn't do anything with command-delete† (which I expect will be the same as ctrl-backspace on Linux or Windows) would you consider supporting that as a way to delete a row or column rather than just clear it?

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† There is no backspace key on a standard macOS keyboard. Instead the key in the upper-right corner of the macOS keyboard which deletes a character at a time, going backward when no modifiers are applied, is labeled "delete".