As suspected a space makes it so you can no longer see the hint text. And you also have to delete the space character before entering other text. Is there any other way of clearing the new text input widget programmatically?
This is a hack I used to make the text Input a bit better for me… but unfortunately you do lose the hint text after the first use (until you press backspace… I tried hardcoding in a backspace, but that also does not work )