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Originally Posted by paulduv
Delete letter, delete letter, delete letter, delete project...
I think the status quo of this text-input behaviour is masking just how dangerous and subconsciously unsettling it is.
Yes OmniFocus supports Undo. But I could carry on working without realizing what I've done. Imagine if the Finder worked that way? Who's wishing it would? Imagine in Illustrator: delete object, delete (last) object, delete document and close window. I can't think of a single app that works this way, or a single instance where one would think, "Darn. I wish I could go from deleting text or an object to deleting all my work.
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Well, I can think of some other apps that work that way with the delete key:
OmniOutliner, OmniPlan (though not OmniGraffle)
Other apps which have similar behavior in a line include Things and Mail, when editing tags and addresses respectively.
The Undo function is substantially more hazardous, in my opinion. At least you can see what the delete key is going to delete, whereas who knows what the Undo function will do (or did), and it will happily switch from undoing your typing a character at a time to undoing that creation of a project or moving something in the hierarchy. I'm hard-pressed to think of an app with a full Undo implementation that doesn't work this way.
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And no, it's not faster, it's slower. The gain of not requiring a modifier key can be measured in milliseconds, and even that's eclipsed the less obvious, but very real need to be careful as you delete text. I have to be careful about it, whereas if I had to hit command-delete, I'd be able to be more carefree within text boxes.
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If you want to be fast and accurate at deleting text in appreciable quantities, the delete key doesn't seem like the way to go, except after you've selected the text to be deleted. I find that cmd-A then delete while editing a task name works great if I want to remove everything. Double-clicking to select the current word gets most of the other cases where I would want to hit the delete key several times. If I want to eliminate several words, click and shift-click to select the region to delete is faster and safer than the delete key, too.
Maybe what seems most natural is a matter of upbringing; coming from a text file world, the Omni behavior seems mostly as I would expect, and the notion of having to hold down a modifier to delete past the beginning of a line or field seems like unnecessary friction. YMMV.