When composing an email, navigating to the Recipient field with (shift)tabs, pasting from clipboard and then Tabbing away does not work properly. I tried various combinations of cursor movement, pauses, etc, but the problem is, I think, that the To: field is not a normal text field, but rather a sort of onramp to a dropdown / search field where GMail tries to guess the address you are entering. I think the JavaScript of the GMail interface is fighting with Text Blaze trying to enter characters.
In any case, the GMail command pack has the ability to add CC and BCC values.
My feature request is to also be able to put a value in the To: field through the same mechanism (and setting the subject too, while you are at it). This avoids having to muck about with Tab navigation and allows for rather cleaner building a subject in variables or grabbing an address from the clipboard and just 'setting' that rather than getting it typed.
For the moment, we want to limit the commands in the Gmail command pack to ones that are supported with a keyboard shortcut. In the future we may change that at which point we can add the "To" command. (Or Gmail may add a "To keyboard shortcut at which point we would also add it.)
My apologies -- I thought you were using the GMail service API (which makes this kind of thing trivial). I do understand your predicament and I will definitely give my feedback to Google directly.
Other than that: do you have anything to add with regards to the unwillingness of the "old skool" shift-tab, shift-tab, paste, tab method not working? I think I have seen this exact mechanism used in a(n older) video of yours, so it might be that GMail's continued development is hindering this trick.
As an alternative to a straight keyboard shortcut, might it be possible to develop a well-tuned prefab combination of keystrokes that /does/ work and package that in the Command Pack?
Thanks for the reply. Maybe there is something else afoot. With your permission, I would like to do that in this thread, for the benefit of others. I tried the exact mechanism you describe, but as part of a much bigger snippet, with forms etc. I'd be happy to share it; mildly redacted off course. This fails for me consistently. (NB: the idea is that this is started from the compose window with an email address on the clipboard)
Found it! The trick is after the entry (or clipboard paste) of the email address, to tab away twice in a row. In my case, I then shift-tab back to enter the subject. The thing breaks when there is only one tab after which non-tab characters are entered; it appears GMail interprets the first tab as a (possible) "i'm done with typing this address, get ready for the next one".
