Do you mean to type to filter values in custom field of enum type? I tested with Firefox 111.0.1 on Mac, and it works fine. On which OS are you seeing this issue?

@robin Yes and pressing 'enter' can actually select it in Chromium. On Linux.

Just tested with Firefox 111.0.1 on Linux and it works fine. Can you please upgrade Firefox to see if it works?

@robin I just did (Mozilla Firefox 111.0.1) and I have the same issue. Not sure what is going on.

It is probably an active X Window thing, I am running Xfce 4.18.

A text editing mouse cursor appears in the box, but clicking brings down the list.

An actual text caret never shows up, and typing letters does nothing.

No issue with Chromium on the same system.

@robin I'm curious, is it an X.org vs. Wayland thing?

I still don't really understand what happened with the whole X.org / Wayland thing.

I don't even know whether Wayland is running or not on my system ( I am guessing it's not? ).

I am not familiar with X.org or Wayland (even did not hear of Wayland before). Only used X window many many years ago on Sun Sparc. Is this still relevant today?

@robin Well X.org is the official continuation of the X Window System (X11) as far as I understand being worked on collaboratively with the freedesktop.org community.

Xorg is the graphical environment that I am running all the time, so I am sure it is still relevant :) I also still have a Sun Sparc :), though I lost the keyboard (tragic story).

Wayland is intended to be a replacement for X11, developed by the freedesktop.org community

I guess this is the way to know:

[jerome]:~$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
x11

Seems I am not running Wayland, but X11, although I do have libwayland-* libraries installed.

There's also Ubuntu's Mir thing which is neither of these things.

I was asking the question because you did not have the issue on Linux / same Firefox version and you clarified the issue as X-specific, so I was wondering if your system happened to be running Wayland rather than X, and that was the differentiator.

Thanks for the detailed and great introduction, 👍 I daily work on Mac, and tested this on the default desktop on Ubuntu@VMWare, and $XDG_SESSION_TYPE is Wayland

@robin Even given the same graphics server (X or Wayland or Mir), different window managers (e.g., Xfce's Xfwm, GNOME's Metacity or Mutter, KDE's KWin), could also come into play, especially when it comes to window activation / focus logic, due how complicated and confusing it is to correctly conform to the freedesktop.org Window Manager specifications that were not part of the original X protocol / system itself. We try to implement this correctly from the application side in our cross-platform Ecere GUI toolkit X driver and been struggling with this for a long time.

"Linux" as a desktop environment is a very heterogeneous thing with thousands of possible combinations.

This seems to explain how to switch between Wayland and X11 on Ubuntu if you or someone else looking into this issue ever want to give this a try:

https://helpdesk.psionline.com/hc/en-gb/articles/13470827149332-How-to-perform-the-switch-from-the-Wayland-display-server-to-Xorg-X11-on-Linux-Ubuntu-22-04-LTS

Summarized here:

• sudo nano /etc/gdm3/custom.conf
• Uncomment WaylandEnable=false and save (that was spelled WaylanEnable without the d, but guessing that's a typo on that page)
• sudo systemctl restart gdm3.
• echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

It's also usually pretty easy to switch to another Window manager e.g.:

sudo apt install xfce4

and you should get an option at login to use Xfce instead of whichever default environment.

@jerstlouis thanks for the great guide. Will follow this to see if I can reproduce this issue when I have bandwidth.

@jerstlouis just switched to xfce4 and XDG_SESSION_TYPE is now x11. Firefox still works fine when type to search enum values.

Odd!

Closing this. Feel free to reopen if there is more clue.