Keyboards and web apps, my post/rant for the year

https://pb.co.za/keyboards-and-web-apps-my-post-slash-rant-for-the-year

by todsacerdoti • 3 years ago

96 79 3 years ago

pb.co.za

Imagine an app without keyboard shortcuts. Web sites.. sorry,apps, not having them is one of the reasons they suck. Please, try and compensate for sucky sites by pretending better that they are apps.

moritzwarhier• 3 years ago

The second reason web apps suck is when they have keyboard shortcuts.

E.g. Outlook Web hijacks CMD+R on my Macbook, of all things.

Wouldn't want to miss CTRL/CMD+K in some web apps though.

teddarific• 3 years ago

Definitely one of my pet peeves is when an app overrides a default short cut. Especially one like refreshing the page.

I wish there was some sort of universal agreement or API for what short cuts should do functionally.

eyelidlessness• 3 years ago

My personal annoyance is when they hijack cmd-f to implement custom search functionality. Especially (but not only) when they fail to handle cmd-e and even more especially cmd-g.

I even understand why in some cases it’s necessary to provide custom search. For example to implement search over lazy loaded content which hasn’t yet loaded. But it never works as expected, even when it’s done well.

ehnto2• 3 years ago

Vimium kind of gets you there. At least, you don't have to move your mouse with it.

amadeuspagel• 3 years ago

What exactly is the problem with the new web APIs? What exactly doesn't work on Firefox and Safari?

CharlesW• 3 years ago

getLayoutMap(), which Mozilla and Apple initially determined carried a significant fingerprinting risk. I don't know if Apple's position or the spec changed, but caniuse says Safari's Technology Preview does support it, so it's apparently coming there soon.

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

This is one of the big reasons why I am not on board with the webapp train. In order for them to be realistic replacements for real applications, the API would have to be very robust. And a very robust API comes with serious privacy issues.

The web is far too hostile of a place to allow exposure of a robust API to it.

jrockway2• 3 years ago

I suppose the problem is that sometimes you want keyboard shortcuts to be non-arbitrary keys. If you're on dvorak, you wouldn't want WASD to be your movement keys in an FPS. They are nowhere near each other. So applications need some sort of API to figure out what keyboard layout is in use, so they can setup the appropriate bindings. (The OS tells them which letter was pressed, not which (row, col) on the keyboard was pressed. But in this case, you kind of want that raw key matrix event.)

This is basically impossible, because the key matrix -> letter translation can be done in multiple places (in the keyboard firmware, in the OS, etc.). Hilariously, sometimes your keyboard firmware has to be aware of the OS translation; you cannot send a & keypress event over USB, so you have to send "shift + 7" if you want a key that generates that input. Because of all this, application developers have to add a "key binding preferences" page to their application. There is absolutely no way they can target a certain physical location on your keyboard.

None of this is specific to Javascript, of course. This is all about protocols and the OS.

zokier2• 3 years ago

This is basically impossible, because the key matrix -> letter translation can be done in multiple places (in the keyboard firmware, in the OS, etc.). Hilariously, sometimes your keyboard firmware has to be aware of the OS translation; you cannot send a & keypress event over USB, so you have to send "shift + 7" if you want a key that generates that input

As someone who just is getting into custom keyboards, this is one really ugly wart in the whole stack. imho ideally keyboard would just send individual scancodes and the host would manage all the key layout stuff. But making fully custom layouts complete with custom modifiers is afaik pretty much impossible with Windows/Mac/mobiles, and even on Linux its bit of a pain. So it ends up easier for keyboard to pretend to be a standard keyboard and have macros to send complex scancode sequences and then just have standard US qwerty layout on host side. Which kinda works until you want to input stuff that is not on the standard US layout at which point you need some different layout on the host, and then you need to remap the keyboard so that it is in sync with the layout. And then you need to sync these configurations across different computers and operating systems.

Sometimes standardization is great, but sometimes it hides all sorts of pitfalls that you'll stumble upon once you actually want to step outside the standard solutions.

pieterbreed5• 3 years ago

As a dvorak typist HJKL as a concept is dead to me.

crote2• 3 years ago

It's not really a problem with the APIs, it is a problem with the common knowledge of how keyboards work.

There is no 1:1 keyboard position -> letter mapping, nor is there a 1:1 letter -> keyboard position mapping. This means something like "detect a press and hold of whatever key results in the input 'w'" is impossible. You can detect an "input" event for it, but there is no guarantee that there will be a "keydown" or "keyup" event. Similarly, you can't have something like "show the label on the key which is normally labelled 'w' on a Qwerty keyboard". It is not guaranteed to have a character associated with it.

Technically nothing is stopping you from creating shortcuts, but you are going to have an awfully hard time creating them in a way which works for all users.

csw-001• 3 years ago

Has anyone worked with/built a web app that let's users set let their hot keys? Seems like it should be possible? That way users who like hot keys can just pick the ones they want...

TonyStr• 3 years ago

That's a lot of work for satisfying very few people. My boss would not be happy

jay_kyburz• 3 years ago

I'm normally the first person to say we browsers don't need to be any more complicated, but this is one thing I think would be pretty cool.

Website authors could specify a list of [name, callback, defaultKey] and each browser could implement an interface to change the binding locally.

There could be a button right in the address bar for both discovering them and changing them.

ehnto2• 3 years ago

It certainly is possible, it just so rarely shows up in modern web projects. It is not something I have ever seen raised in a UX design meeting or during development.

I honestly think it's just lack of awareness. I know it's partly because we warned against jacking native behavior, I think that probably scared people off shortcuts on the web early on. Now we have really complex web apps, but shortcuts are still not being thought about.

blitz_skull• 3 years ago

This is a very strange rant. I’ve built keyboard shortcuts for app used by thousands of international monthly users and have never had a complaint about it.

Also… “onKeyPress” gives you names for most non-letter key presses.

crote2• 3 years ago

Maybe your users are just used to it?

For example, Reddit's rich text editor is broken for me. I cannot type an "é" in it - unless I switch to the manual Markdown mode. Is it annoying? Absolutely. But it only bothers me once every few days and there is a workaround, so whatever.

pieterbreed5• 3 years ago

One of my users apologised for having an AZERTY keyboard. The people out there suffer us.

obscurette• 3 years ago

As international keyboard user – yes, I'm so used that keyboard shortcuts don't work for me that I don't bother to report it. I did it many years ago, but after tens of "we can't do anything about it" answers stopped.

irrational• 3 years ago

So, calendars/dates are complex, storing people’s names in a database is complex, keyboards are complex. What else?

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, off-by-1 errors, and all of the above.

emmanueloga_• 3 years ago

Since computers deal with numbers: There are only really two hard problems in computer science: counting.

edw519• 3 years ago

Nice little rant.

Reminds me of the president of a software house that wrote inventory software for large commercial warehouses. One of his customers required "Box ID", an essential capability that not only tells you how many we own, but exactly which boxes they are in. Everyone has it today.

These people attempted to satisfy this customer, but after a year and nothing to ship (it's not that hard!), they backed out and cried, "We'll never do Box ID again!"

I wonder what that guy is doing today.

And I wonder what OP will be doing tomorrow.

pieterbreed5• 3 years ago

OP will be sleeping in, eating at the pub nextdoor, looking at Table Mountain on the way back home and playing Dave the Diver in the afternoon.

385• 3 years ago

ug, nothing worse than web apps capturing my browser interactions. please don't add keyboard shortcuts, don't disable right click, don't capture Ctrl+F preventing me from using the browser search.

no, your re-implementation of existing browser feature is not better or even wanted.

navanchauhan• 3 years ago

Even though Discourse allows you to get the native Ctrl-F functionality by pressing the combination again, I hate the fact that it even captures that in the first place :(

ecf• 3 years ago

please don’t add keyboard shortcuts

This is entirely unreasonable. Imagine Google docs not being able to offer a shortcut to enable bold formatting, for example. Terrible experience.

charcircuit2• 3 years ago

don't capture Ctrl+F preventing me from using the browser search.

Browser search only searches visible text in the DOM. For performance reasons the whole page might not be loaded into the DOM. This means the default browser search will provide incomplete results.

385• 3 years ago

if you cannot load the whole page for any reason, that's a failure of design. use pagination, that has existed since the 90s.

error5032• 3 years ago

Maybe, but maybe (usually) that's exactly what I wanted. Browser search has well-defined semantics, many of which are useful in ways that are not exactly 'searching the content'. These are semantically different things and overloading the shortcut is frustrating. Use a different shortcut for your incompatible functionality. For example I might use Ctrl-F to look for a UI element like 'Contact Us' that's hidden at the bottom of the page, or to refer to a stanza I read a minute or two ago without trying to find it with my eyes and the scroll bar. Or even to try to find where what I searched for appears when I have clicked on a search result. This last one is especially frustrating.

If I specifically want to search the entire corpus of data on an infinitely-scrolling site, I will use its search function intentionally, since that is a semantically different action.

solardev• 3 years ago

This isn't some insolvable problem. Just have a separate search box and use that for cross-pagination/serverside search. Use a separate hotkey for it, like '/', as many sites do, and leave ctrl-F for the browser search.

krono• 3 years ago

Unsure about other browsers but Firefox lets you allow/block websites from overriding default keyboard shortcuts on a per-site basis as well as globally (defaults to global allow).

Individual site config is located here: application menu bar > "Tools" > "Page Info" > "Permissions" tab > "Override keyboard shortcuts"

385• 3 years ago

bless you

error5032• 3 years ago

Unfortunately this breaks some semantically-compatible extensions to standard shortcuts, like Ctrl-C in Google Docs, which is a perfectly reasonable, necessary, and helpful override, unlike many.

I have found allowing overrides is unfortunately the least annoying of two bad options. But I still get unreasonably annoyed when web apps steal Ctrl-K which I use constantly.

jwells89• 3 years ago

The extension StopTheMadness provides similar functionality for Safari, as well as prevention of other types of annoying behaviors (like nonstandard context menus).

sublinear2• 3 years ago

Anyone can pose similar complaints for native apps and janky desktop environments. This has nothing to do with web apps at all.

recursive3• 3 years ago

It does have to do with web apps because web apps are built on web technologies. And those technologies involve a standardized set of events that are used to react to keyboard interactions. And those standards are deficient.

Non-web apps are subject web technology specifications.

croes6• 3 years ago

Native apps are apps, but web apps are apps in an app with already existing keyboard shortcuts

croes6• 3 years ago

An app without keyboard shortcuts is cumbersome to use

pieterbreed5• 3 years ago

Emacs or vi?

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Sorry, no. I can't use Gmail without shortcut keys and I love Gmail with. Great job, Google engineers. Good app. Good shortcuts.

zeta0134• 3 years ago

And for heck's sake outlook, really, did we NEED modifier-less keyboard shortcuts triggered by single letters? $deity help you if you try to type in Slack while Outlook's Web App is focused; you're likely to archive a dozen emails and possibly delete a folder.

pieterbreed5• 3 years ago

If i knew my post would do well on hn I would have posted it here myself. Well played.

dwg2• 3 years ago

Concrete information on Japanese input for your list:

For English input, being able to submit comments/chats with the enter key is a feature, but for Japanese (and maybe Chinese?) users it's a bug.

In Japanese the enter key is used multiple times to select from multiple possible characters while composing a sentence—it's just how Japanese input works. If an app submits when enter is pressed, it's very difficult to finish typing even a single sentence. Often the only solution is to compose text elsewhere and then copy/paste.

There is a solution: check the keyboard event isComposing (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEve...) property (alternatively, oncompositionstart and oncompositionend) and only submit if false.

bastawhiz• 3 years ago

There's a better solution: wrap your inputs in a form element and rely on the submit event rather than a keyboard event. The browser knows (or should know!) if the user intends to submit or not.

dwg2• 3 years ago

Yes, ideally let the browser handle it, and in many but not all cases that is possible.

folmar2• 3 years ago

Just use submit type input and let the UA handle the complexity.

Flimm• 3 years ago

Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea!

mthoms• 3 years ago

It seems not very well known that you can actually reclaim your alt/option key on MacOS by using the Unicode Hex Input Source for your keyboard. It's not a particularly useful tip if you every need to type accented characters, but great for the rest of us.

darkteflon• 3 years ago

I don’t generally use Google Docs but was surprised to note the other day when using it momentarily with a client that it hijacks Cmd + Shift + R (clear cache and reload tab) on Mac Firefox. Not sure if there are others - I assume so. Truly obnoxious.

Keyboards and web apps, my post/rant for the year

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