tkainrad

HelpHub has a way to add a large CTA for that as a fallback. E.g. our own HelpHub implementation has a _Message Us_ button in the bottom to trigger a chat with a human support agent.

That's a very valid concern.

However, we do love to use our products! Once logged in, you will see that we replaced the Intercom chat widget with HelpHub there. We still offer Intercom chat as a fallback if you need to talk to a human.

Without knowing that product well, I think the main difference is that HelpHub is not just a ChatBot. It's also a full in-app help center with semantic search etc. The ChatBot integrates with the rest of the features and among other things links you to the sources it used to generate the answers.

What I like most about this is that it's not just a chatbot but rather a full in-app help center with a chatbot built-in.

You may not like it but the regular Django admin is what peak UI design looks like.

Going with the VSCode set is a good approach as it has the same bindings as the Chromium DevTools which cannot be changed.

I do so too, with quite similar arguments. I have a blog post about learning all VSCode Shortcuts[1] (did the same for PyCharm) and how it evolved my developing habits. Without learning the shortcuts, many IDE features are not usable. So, if you don't learn the shortcuts, you will not start to use these new features. Consequently, learning shortcuts on the go often does not work.

I fully agree also on creating your own cheat sheets. That's why I have developed an entire app around this idea: KeyCombiner[2]!

It let's you create your own collections, practice them via an interactive trainer and spaced repetition, look them up without context switch through the desktop app's instant look, visualize them on a virtual keyboard, etc.

[1] https://tkainrad.dev/posts/learning-all-vscode-shortcuts-evo...

[2] https://keycombiner.com/

I deployed two minor (unrelated) bug fixes shortly after posting on HN. I thought this works without downtime etc., but maybe you somehow downloaded an incomplete version of the JS code. Not sure how that could happen.

Anyway, glad it works now!

To be fair, you don't need to do all 19 lessons. They are grouped by importance and topic. If you just do the first 2 modules you will already feel quite comfortable with VSCode and I think those can be completed in less than an hour with very little prior experience.

I see your point and I wouldn't mind having something like that. However, much of KeyCombiner requires a database. It stores practice results, personal collections, you can change a lesson's combinations etc.

I feel like if I tried to do a demo mode without storage anonymous users would be left with a 2nd class experience and potentially think less of KeyCombiner.

However, there's already lots of things that anonymous users can do: Browse all public collections, courses, and lessons. Use the practice demo on the home page. Search through KeyCombiner's entire database of public shortcuts. And more.

I already did! ;)

There is KeyCombiner Desktop that enables practice of any browser-reserved shortcuts. Only OS-reserved bindings are still a problem, but fortunately there's very few of those.

KeyCombiner Desktop also comes with an instant lookup feature that let's you look up all shortcuts that are in your combined collections plus those of the currently active application. On macOS, KeyCombiner can even show the shortcuts for the active browser tab!

https://keycombiner.com/desktop/

shortcutFoo is definitely a nice alternative.

However, there are a few things that I think KeyCombiner does better. I am very biased though ;)

- You can edit any combination in your lessons or personal collections. So, if you bind some VSCode bindings to keys that you are used to from Sublime, that's not a problem.

- There are quite sophisticated statistics regarding your practice performance. Most importantly, a confidence value for every combination

- You can create your own collections to practice by copying from public collections, manually defining your own combinations, doing CSV import,...

- There is a desktop app that mitigates conflicts with browser (extension) shortcuts

- The desktop app has an instant lookup feature that shows you the shortcuts of the current app (+ current browser tab on macOS), and all the combinations in your personal collection and lessons. You can trigger the instant lookup from anywhere via a global shortcut, so you don't need to leave your current context.

Hmm, I think Chrome on macOS is probably the most common scenario and well tested.

Those 4 rectangles should contain the next 4 shortcuts that you have to type. Not sure how this could happen. If you don't mind, could you try with a different collection or lesson? Does the browser console show some errors?

Huh, practicing should definitely work also on Firefox. Could you give some more details. Does it work for you with Chrome? Does it work when you try the practice demo on the home page directly at keycombiner.com?

The only limitation with Firefox is that it does not support the navigator.keyboard API. So, the visual keyboard and some other advanced KeyCombiner features cannot show your system's keyboard layout but rather have to default to the US layout.

Vimium was one of the first tools I learned shortcuts for with KeyCombiner[1].

I still have to use KeyCombiner Desktop's instant lookup[2] feature from time to time to look up its more unusual bindings.

A somewhat related blog post: Learning all VSCode shortcuts evolved my developing habits [3]

[1] https://keycombiner.com/

[2] A feature to look up shortcuts without leaving your current app. Can show shortcuts of the current app, current browser tab (macOS only), and shortcuts that you manually curated in collections.

[3] https://tkainrad.dev/posts/learning-all-vscode-shortcuts-evo...

Keyboard shortcuts and commands have a discoverability problem that has not been commonly solved [...]

You might want to have a look at KeyCombiner Desktop[1], an application that can show the shortcuts for the current app without leaving it. On macOS, it even shows shortcuts for the current browser tab.

This solved the problem for me. Disclaimer: I made KeyCombiner

[1] https://keycombiner.com/desktop/

Indeed it does. It's hardly comparable to KeyCombiner, though.

RegExr is more capable when it comes to helping you understand how regular expressions work. KeyCombiner will help you remember the syntax.

Creating an account is required for saving your progress.

Your students are lucky! ;) If you ever have any ideas how KeyCombiner could make your life as a teacher easier, you are very welcome to drop me a line.

Never said it wasn't deprecated. It still works much better than using keydown with keycode. For most apps and layouts, it's a sufficient solution.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. For different apps, different approaches might be best. That's why there is a section on possible solutions.

Regarding events, attributes, and deprecation: keydown (event), code (attribute), and key (attribute) are not deprecated.

Absolutely, that would be a fine solution. It is also mentioned in the article. I really don't know why web application developers are not doing it. Especially when you could be the first to do it and have a real edge over your competitors.

The problem is, most people will not know that alt+dash is an alternative for alt+/ with their layout. Also, it does not actually work with all browsers and operating systems. Try to use dash as a replacement for / in Firefox and you will be disappointed.

However, developers defining and documenting alt+/ as an alternative for alt+/ when registering the binding would indeed be a fine solution.

Not sure if I agree with this summary of my article. For most web apps with relatively few keyboard shortcuts, I would actually recommend to use keypress. keyCode/which/charCode work when used with keypress.

The article mentions an open-source example that does it this way and works fine on international layouts: Discourse

It's a mess, sure. But it is very much possible to hibernate with Linux. I have yet to find a machine where it doesn't work with the way described here: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#hib...

TL,dr: Set up large enough Swap and configure Grub correctly

I agree to some extent. However, I have outlined a few very simple approaches. At the very least, developers could stop using special characters for their most important shortcut bindings.

Emacs has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, and many people like to customize them extensively. Finding efficient, available combinations is not trivial. This virtual keyboard shows on first glance which keys are in use with which modifier combinations.

There is a blog post about it, if you are interested in understanding all of its features and use cases: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/visualize-collections-of-keyboard...

KeyCombiner has similar public visualizations for other IDEs and applications:

VSCode: https://keycombiner.com/collections/vscode/

IntelliJ IDEA: https://keycombiner.com/collections/intellij-idea/

XCode: https://keycombiner.com/collections/xcode/

Sounds great, and thanks for the generous sample!

I think a lot about mouseless computer interaction myself as I am making KeyCombiner[1], which is an application to organize, learn, and practice keyboard shortcuts.

Among many other things, it can map collections of keyboard shortcuts onto a virtual keyboard. This helps immensely when looking for free combinations or conflicts, which is often the case with VSCode and Neovim. You can have a look at the public VSCode collection[2] to see the visualizer in action.

KeyCombiner's concept of building your own shortcut collections could be very handy for your proposal to create your own cheat sheets. With KeyCombiner Desktop[3], you can instantly look up these cheat sheets. In addition to your own collections (cheat sheets), the instant lookup always shows the default keyboard shortcuts of the active application.

[1] https://keycombiner.com

[2] https://keycombiner.com/collections/vscode/

[3] https://keycombiner.com/desktop/

KeyCombiner is an app for organizing, learning, and practicing keyboard shortcuts. On top of that, there is a desktop app that can instantly show the shortcuts of the currently active application.

So, displaying keyboard shortcuts was always an important part of KeyCombinder, and I spent a lot of time to optimize this experience with searching and filtering features. However, these feature are not sufficient when you want to understand a collection of hundreds of shortcuts at a glance. I have been thinking about this problem since I started working on KeyCombiner almost precisely one year ago. Today, I am happy to announce that KeyCombiner offers a solution: The Shortcut Collection Visualizer

For any shortcut collection on KeyCombiner, (public collections of 60+ popular applications, your personal collections, collections shared with you by people you know), it is now possible to show a virtual, interactive keyboard that uses colors to highlight which keys are used with which combination of modifier keys. Hopefully, it will be more obvoious if after you tried it out.

If there was a way to get a user's custom keybindings on all operating systems for a large majority of applications, I would surely do it. Writing configuration parser's for each application+OS pair is not feasible, and would not work for all applications.

However, I think, in practice, you will find that the custom collections are a nice solution to this problem. I use a lot of custom bindings myself. Having the lookup show both my custom binding and the default binding is actually very nice to understand your custom bindings and find combinations where you might be better of with the default.

Yes and no.

It shows the default bindings of the active application's shortcuts. However, with KeyCombiner you can also create personal collections of shortcuts and commands. Those are always shown. In these personal collections, you can set whatever bindings and customizations you like. You can quickly build these collections by importing selected(or all) shortcuts from the public collection of an application.

In practice, when I use the lookup and search for a shortcut that I have customized, I will see both the default binding (because it's shown for the active application), and my own binding (because it's in my personal collections).

Sorry if this was confusing. The blog post explains it in more detail and illustrates with animations.