vi keyboard shortcuts blatantly stolen from G+ please

[stuntpilot99]

Title:
vi keyboard shortcuts blatantly stolen from G+ please

Area:
Frontend

Summary:
j and k for forward and back one post. Could perhaps go one further and add h for parent, and l for child.

Description:
Use j and k for forward and back one post. Could perhaps go one further and add h for parent, and l for child in thread.

Ok, clearly I'm a vim user, but regardless of that, these keys are used pretty much nowhere as shortcuts. FF already nicely implements / for search.

The single most brilliant idea of G+ is I can <i>cleanly</i> skip or backup a post with one keypress. (It would appear I'm easily pleased) Spacebar doesn't do it - especially here where a post could be 5 lines or 500 lines with embedded pictures. Also sometimes it's nice to cleanly go back to start of a post to check/re-read. No other site, to my knowledge does similar, but I now press these damn keys on LJ and FB all the time - and still it never works no matter how many times I try! :D

Any other website that offers a shortcut or two tends to be using meta key combinations like CTRL / ALT. This of course means there's a big chance of getting in the way of local applications which have mapped the same combination. Skip post then becomes skip track in winamp or volume and you're irritated (or deafened) :)

DW has lengthy posts regularly - some of them I'm simply not going to be interested in - be that another 206 pictures of someone's redecorating, pet cat, paper clip collection, or simply a huge post on something you've no interest in.

Set an anchor on each entry, and let me skip in one smooth action. It's a simple fix for much added slickness.

Poll #8897 vi keyboard shortcuts blatantly stolen from G+ please

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 65

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
10 (15.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
8 (12.3%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
14 (21.5%)

(I have no opinion)
32 (49.2%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (1.5%)

Comments

[ct]

Provided it could be implemented in a way that doesn't cause problems for people who don't want to use the keyboard shortcuts, I would love this. Google Reader has this, too, and it's one of my favorite features.

[chagrined]

I'd love even more keyboard shortcuts than this. It'd be awesome if the same keyboard shortcuts could go forward/back in different ways depending on what is viewing. The idea I have of this is:
-If on a journal/community recent entries page, go back/forward # entries
-If on a read page/network page, go back/forward # entries
(And since these are different pages, you could use the same keybinding for each, and it could possibly also be the same as the keybinding when viewing an entry, although I have another musing on that below.)

With what to do when viewing an entry, I'm undecided. This suggestion suggests going back/forward an entry. I think more than that I often find myself wanting to go back/forward pages of comments on the entry. Maybe a different keybinding for each? I really like the new forward/back pages of comments feature recently implemented on LiveJournal (they do use a ctrl+arrow keybinding, though).

Anywho, I'm in favor of any and all keyboard shortcuts that are implemented. It's an accessibility win for me as well. And I do prefer vi keybindings myself b/c then I don't have to hold down one key while pressing another key (which is more painful).

[stuntpilot99]

I like the idea of context sensitive too. Perhaps

Skip past entries one at a time in your friends page view
Skip between comment entries in single post view, with h and l going up and down levels of hierarchy in threads.

That's how I was visualising it anyway.

I'm happy with CTRL left / right for paging, but maybe for accessibility it's better to use up non-meta combinations first?

(And I don't like heavy use of meta combos as some I've set up locally)

[alexbayleaf]

I'd definitely like a keyboard shortcut for "expand cut tags in this post" while I'm navigating by keyboard.

[ninetydegrees]

Noting that h is History on FF so no or different letter for that one.

[stuntpilot99]

No, CTRL h is history on FF - I don't believe anything is mapped to those four in browsers currently.

[ninetydegrees]

My apologies! I didn't pay enough attention when I read your suggestion.

[florahart]

I use Linux at home, and typing letters in Firefox just brings up a quicksearch bar (like ctrl-F without, you know, typing ctrl-F). I don't know if 1. this is overcomable or 2. it would create drama that would need overcoming. Mostly, therefore, I'm agreeing with the comment above that it should be possible to turn it off.

[jazzfish]

Or disable it by default, since having what I think will be "quicksearch" suddenly turn into "navigate to a different page" engenders a great deal of rage.

[zeborah]

+1 - I use Firefox on Mac and PC and regularly use just-start-typing to find something I was reading a moment ago before my cat stepped on the keyboard. Or when my wrists suck and I'm reduced to voice navigation I need to speak the name of any link I want to follow and this is similarly understood by Firefox as just-start-typing, so I wouldn't want anything to break that.

[arethinn]

This depends on how you have Firefox configured. Under Tools > Options > Advanced > General there are a few checkboxes for this, and also some possible about:config tweaks that can change the behavior of whether it pops up whenever you start typing, or if you must invoke it with a special keystroke, and whether it finds links only or all text on the page.

[rho]

My reason for voting against this is that we already have <link rel=next> and <link rel=previous> metadata in place, and I think that's how things should be done at our end. It's then up to the browser to interpret these links accordingly. For instance, I have the link widgets addon for firefox, and can go to next and previous on DW pages with cmmd-. and cmmd-,

I know this is kind of a pain, since browser support for <rel> links is pretty sucky at the moment, but I think that adhering to the standard is the best thing to do in this case. That way, we don't end up in a mess where different sites are using different keys, and different people have different preferences, and so on. This is much better with the keyboard shortcuts dealt with browser-side.

And yes, I know there's also something to be said for ignoring standards that aren't well supported if doing so will bring a big usability boost, but given the small percentage of users who would actually use this function, I don't think it's justified in this case.

[stuntpilot99]

As opposed to the even smaller number of users who'd install yet another addon for a rarely adopted standard? Although if you've got the markers needed to navigate thread hierarchies sanely in place too, such an addon might solve my own want well enough.

It may be the better case and place for them to be, but if browsers simply don't support them as of yet, that's not a solution.

Not sure there's a need for any preferences for this suggestion though.

Is the percentage who'd use actually that tiny though? Keyboard being significantly faster after all. (I have no idea of actual likelihood). Sure, most don't but power users are a pretty significant subset.

[rho]

I don't have any actual figures or demographics, so I'm only guessing, but this will only be of use to people who:

a. Prefer keyboard navigation to mouse navigation.
b. Have a use case such that they frequently use previous and next links.
c. Know that this feature exists.

I can't imagine this being a large number of people at all.

Also, the standard really isn't that rarely adopted. As well as Dreamwidth, it's also used by LiveJournal, Movable Type, Google search, many webcomics, etc. It's far from universally supported, I agree, but it's not as if this is just a Dreamwidth thing and it's an addon that would just work from Dreamwidth. It's a broader solution for the minority of users for whom this would be a useful feature.

[azurelunatic]

Well, given a and b, someone in that use case might try it against Dreamwidth in case it works, rather than by knowing it works.

[rho]

Which, for me, is another argument in favour of using the established standard, rather than making our own arbitrary decision on what keys we should use. I know of at least one site which uses z and x for previous and next, so people could equally as well try that to see if it works. With <link rel> people can wonder if we have it and try whatever they have things set up as on their own system, and get a definitive answer. If we're relying on a JS keyboard shortcut, people would have to try multiple keyboard possibilities or look at the page source to get a definitive answer.

[arethinn]

b. Have a use case such that they frequently use previous and next links.

I was not picturing navigating next/previous post within a journal displaying one post at a time (although I do that occasionally), but jumping down to the next item on a reading page or when viewing someone's journal in the view of 10 or 20 or however many posts per page they have set. (Since the OP mentions that spacebar does not do it for them, I assumed that scenario was what they were talking about.)

[montuos]

I am failing to get from point A to point B here. Could you please explain what this means to a user who has no clue what "<link rel=next>" and "<link rel=previous>" mean? Apart from the fact that apparently browsers don't support it which means that it's useless to an end user anyway?

I approve of following standards. But I approve more of having a usable product.

[matgb]

Could you please explain what this means to a user who has no clue what "" and "" mean?

It's a (reasonably newish) standard in which a site can tell a browser where they should go if the next/previous button is pressed. Currently it's not implemented in a lot of browsers, but a few years back that was true of embedded video, etc.

It can be implementable already with plugins, etc and the more sites that use and support it the more likely it is that browser designers will wuypport it natively without the need to install a plugin at all.

Essentially, you don't need to know what the backend is doing as an end user, but if you want the feature you can install something to get it working.

I approve of following standards. But I approve more of having a usable product.

I approve of using standards to make a usable product.

A thought is occurring. We need a Dreamwidth Firefox/Chrome/whatever plugin that supports all this stuff that we can promote to users. I have no clue where to start with such things, but there are many features that can be accessed better with a plugin.

(I have progammable mouse thumb buttons so they're page up/page down when I'm browsing, so irrelevent to me)

[montuos]

Ok, so the short answer is that however good or useful the standard is, it is not currently implemented in most browsers and may not be for years yet, so we might as well try for something here and now to bridge the gap.

[azurelunatic]

The way Gmail does it is has a setting to explicitly turn on keyboard navigation; if there was a settin (another one) to use DW's choice of commands & otherwise stuff is accessible via the standards...

[stuntpilot99]

After an admittedly brief play, that addon seems to do something entirely different in that it's entirely mouse driven with no way to give it key shortcuts, goes to display single DW entries and navigates between them within a journal or community - but does nothing on reading page.

It seems to go to not found pages quite frequently, so Im not entirely sure what it's picking up or how- although I note in the docs it's doing some "guesses" to extract links.

It doesn't interact at all within a page - ie it doesn't move between entries ON the page which was the point of this suggestion - be that posts on a reading page / someone's journal or community, or comments on an individual entry.

[montuos]

I am strongly in favor of having keyboard shortcuts available for movement between posts even though I wouldn't use them much. I would however like there to be a setting to turn them on and off, as several sites and applications I use do, but I would still want the shortcuts even without this additional feature.

I'd be happy enough with the vi-style hjkl keys that I learned nearly 30 years ago playing rog/srog/rogue/nethack, or if there's a more widely-used standard, I'd be happy enough to learn that. Either way, I would want the usage to be well-documented.

Pending feedback from rho, whose argument I do not currently understand, I'm voting "implement as-is".

[aibro]

I don't care whether this is implemented or not, but if it is, I'd want an option to disable it.

[cheyinka]

I'd want it to be opt-in - I'd hate to be surprised one day by this kind of behavior suddenly showing up.

[msilverstar]

+1

[melannen]

I really strongly oppose the idea of using the letters suggested. They only make sense (or are even halfway convenient) for people using a standard QWERTY keyboard, which not everybody does, for various reasons from nationality/language to disability to personal preference. If you want to add such shortcuts, make them workable in a non-keyboard-dependent way.

Also, I happen to use a browser that does follow HTML standards and thus I already have working keyboard shortcuts for navigation (which I can change to make sense with my key layout). If you really want this capability, I suggest you start using a proper browser? :P

[stuntpilot99]

Well as neither chrome or FF - both standards compliant browsers I use, offer this, what do you call a "proper browser" that I should switch to? :p

Though FF does offer some behaviour (albeit mouse only) with an addon mentioned somewhere else in the comments here, it's not close to the behaviour I'm suggesting

[aedifica]

I cautiously support this--it seems like a boon for non-mouse users--but only if it's not the default behavior.

[arethinn]

I do this kind of thing by mistake (actually I use N and P as in Google Reader) - come over to reading my flists or circle and try to press N for next to no avail. (Which, for me, jumps to the first link on the page containing N, because that's how I have Fx configured). It would be fancy if that actually worked - although there should also be a way to turn it off, because I know I am often very frustrated at the way Google or other sites interrupt my usual shortcut behavior this way. I want it in some places and not in others.