I'm so frustrated these days with a lack of keyboard controls in GUI applications. It's like developers just want to limit you to being able to operate their software with one single finger. And most of the time they're bad at UX, so you wind up not having coherent workflows even with a mouse.
I'm a huge fan of vim keybinds. The concept is fantastic, you've got a panel of switches in front of you that you can make do anything, why limit it to being a typewriter? That said, ctrl keys are fine. I can live with it. It works. If that's all I can get, please do it. Any desktop application should have at a bare minimum Ctrl shortcuts for everything.
> But in our data set, a staggering 64% of CommandBar users have used at least one keyboard shortcut and 20% have used keyboard shortcuts at least 10 ten times.
That sounds like 44% of users have triggered a keyboard shortcut by mistake.
User-modifiable shortcuts plus a user willing to modify them are the key to happiness. It lets you iterate until you are satisfied. The macOS has better built-in tools for this; for Windows you need to install PowerToys. But that's just for the OS level adjustments.
Applications are in far worse shape, overall. Most applications don't support shortcut customization! Not even browsers. A remarkable oversight, IMHO. But most apps don't support shortcut customization, forcing you to learn their shortcuts, which is user-hostile no matter how well they are designed, IMHO.
forget coherent, i want consistent.
using a mac for work and a windows machine for personal use messes with me. add in editors having inconsistent emacs keybindings, and some macos apps respecting some subset of emacs keybindings while others don't...and then a kinesis advantage to make some of the solutions non-viable
Is there any hope of handing off keyboard shortcut customisation and recognition to the user agent instead of each web app having to reinvent them? In my ideal world it would be a requested permission (so web pages wouldn’t be able to prevent normal shortcut behaviour by default) and at some initialisation step the website would hint at the things it would like to be able to do (eg purposes, similar commands, groups, suggested keys) and the browser would figure out some reasonable mappings and offer customisability. Browsers could even offer search for web app commands (like eg Mac apps when searching from the help menu).
But web apps might not like potentially giving up so much control over their interface/UX and I think the system would need to be so complicated (eg look at Emacs with nested keymaps, remapping, multiple active keymaps, transient keymaps, and even the weird translation maps) that it would be often overkill and frequently incomprehensible and practically unconfigurable.
But the status quo where web apps often have fixed keyboard shortcuts, override browser/os defaults to do totally unrelated operations, and offer little recourse also doesn’t seem great. All I really want is for Google docs on Linux to give me Emacs (or at least macOS) style shortcuts for moving in text.
Hands down the best implementation of shortcuts I've come across is Blender (the 3d modeller). First it has shortcuts for many actions out of the box and second you can create or modify any keyboard shortcuts on (almost) any operator (button) in the interface by right clicking on the operator and assigning your shortcuts. There is also a fully searchable and customisable key map, you can import and export key maps and you can switch between them easily. Lastly it supports search based navigation.
Coherent and consistent keyboard shortcuts can be incredibly helpful. We spent a ton of time on the choices for GitAlias https://github.com/gitalias/gitalias
I fully agree with the article saying "your users might not even agree on what constitutes a typical workflow". And it's painful to cut shortcuts that people like for their workflows, but that don't cohere well, or can't be consistent.
On the subject of consistent keyboard shortcuts, does anyone here have a copy of the complete Common User Access documents? What I can find online (linked to from Wikipedia below) is incomplete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
Alternatively, I'm also interested in a comprehensive listing of Common User Access keyboard shortcuts. Without the original documents themselves, I'm not sure how comprehensive (or accurate) what I'm seeing online is.