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0 pointsmillstone5y ago0 comments

It's legitimately hard to make a good keyboard shortcut on the web, especially since there's no interop with native keyboard shortcuts (e.g. no web Undo API). This becomes a death spiral: users don't expect keyboard shortcuts to work, so nobody bothers making them.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

brundolf5y ago· 2 in thread

I wouldn't say it's hard... I've worked on a web app that had extensive keyboard shortcuts because it was designed for power-users. There are some platform-specific inconveniences like listening for Cmd on Mac vs Ctrl on Windows/Linux, but that's nothing compared to writing an entirely separate application for each platform.

I think they don't get made because of a) a cultural shift, and maybe also b) because the browser itself has some keyboard shortcuts that users may care about more (and don't want overridden). For example Twitter actually has a bunch of shortcuts and I usually invoke them on accident. But if your users are power-users then they probably know what features are available, and of course if you're using electron then the point is moot.

millstoneOP5y ago

The web makes it much easier to give a button a drop shadow than a keyboard shortcut; that's the sense in which it's hard. The web's origin is documents, not software.

"Users don't want websites to override their keyboard shortcuts" is so right and so telling! We've all been burned by copying a Google search link, or had 'automated link attribution' spam our clipboards. Keyboard shortcuts should not be a "power user" feature but that's where we find ourselves, as the web subverts all user interactions.

brundolf5y ago

  document.addEventListener("keydown", (e) => {
    if (e.ctrlKey && e.code === "KeyA") {
      console.log("Shortcut pressed!")
    }
  })

I qualify the above as easy.

> "Users don't want websites to override their keyboard shortcuts" is so right and so telling!

I mean, it's no different from an OS that has shortcuts that applications shouldn't override. The browser is just one more system layer. That may limit some of the specific shortcuts you may want to use (or not! you can override them if you deem that worthwhile to your users), but it doesn't make things "hard". At my company we solved this by adding Shift to every binding, which browsers hardly ever use.

And again, if you're using Electron, you don't even have to worry about that aspect because your user isn't exposed to the UI "as a website", meaning they won't be reloading, going back/forward, opening new tabs, etc which are the most common browser-level keybindings.

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