Customizer: When updating menu item text boxes the preview pane refreshes causing a pause in typing

[majemedia]

Please note that this does NOT apply when editing menus from Appearance -> Menus.

Steps:

1. Edit a menu item's navigation label or title within customizer
2. Try to type a long sentence

Frustration results from:

1. While trying to type the preview pane refreshes multiple times resulting in pauses during typing.

Ideas to fix:

• Increase the amount of time between preview refreshes when typing
• Wait for a pause in typing of a certain length (I think this might head into accessibility territory so I'm not going to suggest a wait-time)
• (I don't like this one but here it is): Only refresh the preview pane on unfocus event

I marked as performance as well because this causes a LOT of refreshes which may or may not affect server load.

[dlh]

Hi @majemedia, and thanks for filing this report.

Is the behavior with typing in an input for nav menus different than typing in other text inputs that use the refresh transport? Did it start occurring in a recent version of WordPress?

[majemedia]

@dlh thanks for the questions!

Is the behavior with typing in an input for nav menus different than typing in other text inputs that use the refresh transport?

Yes. Updating the Site Title waits until I finish typing before refreshing. Customizer -> Site Identity

Did it start occurring in a recent version of WordPress?

I really don't know. Up to this point I've been 100% editing menus from within the nav-menus.php but figured I'd try it out recently.

[dlh]

Thanks! Next question: Are you able to replicate the behavior with a default theme and with no plugins activated?

In my testing of Twenty Nineteen on an installation of trunk, both the site title and the nav menu partials in the preview refresh only after I finish typing, as hoped for. But, as you can imagine, there are number of potential causes for latency like that described that I might not be exposed to yet.

[majemedia]

@dlh I'll try it out on a vanilla site. An additional piece of information I left out was that this menu is massive (60+ items of mixed Page/custom links) and varying depth (although the pause happened at every level).

I'll try duplicating on vanilla with a small menu and then put together a really big one and see if I can dupe.

[celloexpressions]

I'm 95% sure that this is the same issue documented in #38954. If not, please reopen this ticket.