Drafted notes are lost when focus is removed from block

[westonruter]

Description

I noticed a couple scenarios where a drafted Note is lost.

Moving focus to another block when a drafted note is not submitted

Screen.Recording.2025-11-20.at.13.14.55.mov

Switching to another window before submitting the Note

Screen.Recording.2025-11-20.at.13.19.48.mov

Step-by-step reproduction instructions

1. Start drafting a Note on a block, but don't submit it.
2. Focus on another block.
3. Focus back on the previous block, and notice the drafted Note is gone.

Additionally:

1. Start drafting a Note.
2. Switch to another window (e.g. PhpStorm)
3. switch back to the browser.
4. The drafted Note is gone.

Screenshots, screen recording, code snippet

No response

Environment info

No response

Please confirm that you have searched existing issues in the repo.

• Yes

Please confirm that you have tested with all plugins deactivated except Gutenberg.

• Yes

Please confirm which theme type you used for testing.

• Block
• Classic
• Hybrid (e.g. classic with theme.json)
• Not sure

[desrosj]

I think there are two improvements that could be made here:

1. The note should be preserved until the page is reloaded. Clicking off the block should not result in losing a note someone is working on. Since the selected block is focused in a similar way to spotlight mode, it's reasonable to expect someone to remove focus on the current block to examine the surrounding context.
2. An alert when focus is removed from the block to warn them the note will be lost if not submitted.

[westonruter]

The first is definitely what we should do, IMO. In Google Docs you can see that all drafted comments are kept and all unsubmitted comments are retained until submitted, even when moving focus to another comment or somewhere else in the doc:

Screen.Recording.2025-11-24.at.09.04.09.mov

[Mustafabharmal]

I’ve created a PR that fixes the issue where the draft note content was not being preserved when switching to another block. The same behavior is now handled correctly for replies as well.
PR: #75030

You can also test the changes directly here:
https://playground.wordpress.net/?gutenberg-pr=75030