I love keyboard shortcuts. I hate the mouse. I use vi and emacs.
It feels great to use an application like gmail where you can key-around the interface and do not have to deal with the mouse as much as normal in the browsing world. A mix of mutt and Mail.app.
I would love a utility that showed me the keystrokes available on a given page / web application. It would be easy to work out the keypresses caught, but the hard part is working out what they do. Knowing that “w” does something isn’t very helpful. The only way I could see this working out is if frameworks such as Dojo had a nice way to build shortcut keys, similar to getopts in unix.
If you develop an application, you create a hash of keystrokes, documentation string, and a function to callback on. If we standardized (small s) this data structure, one browser extension / greasemonkey script, could grok it and let you have a toolbar with that information (with options to always show it if there are bindings, only show when a user hits a quickkey, etc).
The next level would be to standardize some of the constructs. In a threaded view, j and k go up and down. Or maybe, a user could change the keystrokes. THREAD_VIEW_DOWN defaults to ‘j’, but a user can override it.
A pipe dream I know.
November 20th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
That’s actually a pretty interesting observation. I’ve heard that there is an extremely slim chance that something along the lines of some serious collaboration on ixd type work might be happening.(which includes new players you don’t typically see associated with Dojo) Don’t know if you’ve been invited already but I’m quite certain Alex would happily add you in.
November 21st, 2006 at 1:16 am
The WOW7 area need to be recruited warriors for fighting together now….
game
November 21st, 2006 at 7:03 am
You mean something like http://www.macility.com/products/keycue/ for web pages ? That would be really nice…
November 21st, 2006 at 2:40 pm
Though very simple, the Konqueror browser shows all shortcuts (accesskey definitions) when Ctrl is pressed and released. The definitions are shown as small labels on the place of the html element they are access key too.
November 21st, 2006 at 4:35 pm
I’m building a IPTV UI inside browsers running on set top boxes. There we have to use *only* key navigation since the remote is all there is.
You’ll really need to standardize on the application level if you want something like this and I think a simple hash of key handlers won’t do since keys meanings might differ from context to context (not only in a remote only environment).
We didn’t standardize on this from the beginning (2.5 years ago) but we have started to do it now (internally in our company) in order to get context sensitive help etc. We are using an object oriented approach where you can “inherit” key handler objects (or classes, we dynamically compose a lot of objects using the dynamics of javascript) that is called from “state manager”. That helps to keep things a bit more DRY.
November 22nd, 2006 at 7:01 pm
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November 24th, 2006 at 1:30 am
l s sd
March 12th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
I know what you mean about the shortcuts. My first computer was a laptop (1995) and using the “builtin” mouse was a pain in the neck to use. So, I had to adapt not to use the mouse at all. The habit still applies now on my PC. Shortcuts are great!