Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27080627-20161013174107/@comment-24473195-20161021145613

I suggest reading about it here Help:Editing.

Anyway, to answer your some of your usability issues / doubts:

"In lots of places, dialogs pop up and when I start typing,"

Yes, this is because the developers deliberately made the editor cater to both experienced editors and newbies, and in doing so added a few  unintuitive  (for a beginner)   shortcuts   that add popups. For example, typing "[[" will pop up a link dialog, because that's how it is in wikitext, typing "*"  at the beginning of a sentence will create a list, and finally typing some obscure wikitext that a newbie might not even know will trigger "loud" warnings about not doing so. Personally, I think they should either just disable all of these, or make it optional.

"under the assumption that the cursor is in the dialog's textbox"

Cursoring is the biggest problem with all html based editors, because at any point the browser or other tools itself may steal the focus. Not to mention the complication with non-latin based languages.

"it is not and instead other things happen in my browser page"

Typing in a browser is a constant war between the huge amount of keyboard shortcuts and any extra tools that a site may have. For example, typing backspace may result in loss of work as the browser goes to a previous page. There are ways to mitigate this, but ultimately the browser is the boss, and has the last say.

"when I am done editing a page and the summary dialog pops up"

I do agree this is particularly annoying, one solution is to click tab twice. That being said, I've tested Wikimedia's version and it has been fixed there at least (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Sandbox?action=edit).

In short, VisualEditor is a work in progress improving every so often. The one true sourceTM editor is a permanent fallback, and the some of other editors will be eventually be killed off.

Anyway, I suggest submitting these ideas or issues to staff, see Special:Contact.

"So that editor is better at some things"

One of its greatest strength is table editing, and it saved me a lot of time today.