Handling of TIME fields

I have noticed in the latest nightly builds that the HeidiSQL editor has a hard time handling TIME fields.

Instead of using 8 characters (HH:MM:SS), it's doing 10 with two spaces at the beginning ( HH:MM:SS). This makes it hard to enter data, because if you start typing the first two characters you overwrite are the spaces, not the time data... so if you enter 143000 for 14:30:00, it ends up looking like 1430:00:00 instead. It also won't let you hit the space bar to clear out those first two spaces, so you have to enter 00143000, and then it seems unsure how to format the data for display after updating the table row. It's quite weird.

Just thought you'd like to know.

MySQL offers to enter time ranges and negative time values. That's what users asked for, being able to do that via HeidiSQL. See issue #2203.

Would it be possible to display the value so that this is clear, and/or that the first digit of the number is the first character selected when pressing F2 to edit? The current behavior is confusing, especially since you can't press the space bar to move to the third column to start entering data.

Don't know what you mean by "display the value so that this is clear". Is the time value not displayed for you?

However, probably you don't know you can press up and down arrows in each of the date/time segments, maybe that helps.

The problem is the discrepancy between the way the data is displayed and the way it is edited. The time value is displayed in HH:MM:SS format, but when you enter edit mode it seems to be +HHH:MM:SS based on what you've said. Thus, when you enter edit mode it's asking for a different data format than what is being used for display, and this is very confusing.

My recommendations are to:

(1) Display the time using +HHH:MM:SS format so it's clear that this is actually what it's expecting on data entry,

(2) Place the cursor on the first non-whitespace digit when entering edit mode so it is easier to enter data in the same HH:MM:SS format used for display,

or (3) Not use a masked formatted field so data can be entered in free form and parsed automatically by HeidiSQL before posting to the server.

As it stands, it's very confusing because it looks like HH:MM:SS for display but it expects +HHH:MM:SS for entry.