5 ms·

These hotkeys in websites are an utter curse. So many times I've started typing in Jira, then something weird happened that caused my keystrokes to be interpret

by smcl 5y ago

These hotkeys in websites are an utter curse. So many times I've started typing in Jira, then something weird happened that caused my keystrokes to be interpreted by the page instead of entered into a comment box ... then the ticket gets reopened, unassigned, etc.

shantnutiwari 5y ago
yeah, and bonus points if then you then spend 10 minutes trying to figure out what happened, and how to undo it
drcongo 5y ago
And most of them don't check to see if the user is also holding down a modifier key, thereby overriding your system keyboard shortcuts. Yes. I _am_ looking at you Google Spreadsheets.
- kps 5y ago
  Firefox used to not send those to the site js; I think that broke with the Quantum update. Just one of its thousand cuts.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    I'm sure that was a "bugfix" where someone complained that website required you to hit CTRL-Q to navigate or something and the browser was consuming the key. Have to make it work like Chrome.
Steltek 5y ago
(I feel like we jumped topics from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895) JIRA's Search is far worse than the regular JIRA hotkeys. The Enter key will incorrectly tab-complete JQL just before executing the search. Meanwhile, the Tab key doesn't tab-complete and instead focuses the Search button (which lets you execute the uncorrupted JQL). You have to actively train yourself out of how everything else works just to avoid going insane. Well, that or use the mouse just to click Search (eww). Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest thing to joy.
- ep103 5y ago
  Above a certain level of complexity, Jira is the best work tracking and managing solution I've worked with. Its curse, is its developed by Atlassian. A company that was capable of buying Stash, and, somehow, somewhat, turned that codebase into what we now know as bitbucket.
  - dljsjr 5y ago
    Other way around. They made Stash in house, they bought BitBucket, and rebranded Stash as BitBucket Server. The BB acquisition happened before Stash was released but Stash was not an acquisition.
    - ep103 5y ago
      I was of the impression that they bought Stash, renamed it to Bitbucket Server, and stopped development, while slowly attempting to reimplement stash code into Bitbucket cloud, one feature at a time?
      - dljsjr 5y ago
        Nope, you can see a condensed version of their acquisition history on their Wiki page for more proof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian#Acquisitions_and_product_announcements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian#Acquisitions_and_pro... When BitBucket was acquired they were cloud only, and when Stash launched it was on-prem only. We used Stash and BitBucket Cloud around that time at the place I was working and I can definitely tell you that on-prem Stash was definitely not a reskinned on-prem BitBucket Cloud; for one I’m pretty sure BitBucket Cloud was written in Python (Django) and Stash was a typical Atlassian Java product.
  - hpoe 5y ago
    If your org needs that much complexity it probably is at a point that the time and money wasted waiting for Jira todo things is probably small in comparison to the rest of the wasted efficiency.
sneak 5y ago
I wish I could turn off js's ability to handle keypress events on a per-site basis.
pjc50 5y ago
So many times I've started typing in bash, and then realised that my focus has been on a website instead, which starts doing some ridiculous stuff in response. There's no way to discover hotkey functionality otherwise, of course, because "thou shalt not discover" is a modern UX guideline.
- mjevans 5y ago
  Underlined hotkeys for menu context and for thought to be hot-path actions dedicated keyboard combinations outside of the menus. Aside from auto-complete searchbars, I think UI functionality peeked in the mid to late 1990s.
  - farmerstan 5y ago
    Peak usability was when chrome started hiding zoom buttons for PDFs. I remember at one point to increase the size of a pdf there was no visual indication at all. You had to stumble upon the buttons on the bottom right of the page and they would magically appear. Ever since then designers have decided that looking cool is better than being easy to use and it’s been shit.
- mst 5y ago
  A non-zero number of websites have followed web twitter in making '?' produce a hotkey display. Naturally tumblr isn't one of them.
  - mrguyorama 5y ago
    Except now how am I supposed to know '?' brings up this display?
    - johnsoft 5y ago
      The same way you know you can run any command with `--help`. Most commands anyway. I'm looking at you, netcat
nerdponx 5y ago
Github has (or maybe had) some hotkey that not only opens a clunky browser-based text editor, but also forks the repo under your account. Then you have to go back and manually delete the repo that you didn't intend to fork. Ugh! Also a lot of web-based code editors override the standard Ctrl/Cmd-L shortcut ("go to URL bar") to mean "go to line". It's nice having IDE-like affordances, I guess, but not when it interferes with the basic functionality of the browser.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  Isn't the "standard" shortcut for "go to line #" actually Ctrl+G?
clumpthump 5y ago
Squarespace's "ESC to go to Squarespace login" is a huge pain for me as well. I think it's on by default. I CTRL+F pretty often. I press ESC to clear it. I get redirected to Squarespace if I'm on a Squarespace site that hasn't turned off this "feature".
dddddaviddddd 5y ago
Gmail shortcuts are great, until focus jumps away from the search field while typing in it. This happens if you try to search before the page has fully loaded.
- remram 5y ago
  This happens ALL THE TIME. At first I thought I was touching the touchpad by mistake, but I now have no touchpad and it's definitely Gmail forgetting where I'm typing. Then I have to figure out what actions I may have triggered and undo.
johnsoft 5y ago
This is why desktop apps use the Ctrl key for shortcuts. I'm not sure how that bit of common sense got lost in the transition to webapps.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  The lack of Ctrl is sadly a feature for web apps. You don't know which browser, and thus which set of shortcuts your user will be using your app from. However assuming that shortcuts will be prefixed is a pretty safe assumption, so the non-prefixed letters are really the only safe option for web app hotkeys as they form a relatively safe space of shortcuts.
_moof 5y ago
I feel like the modern web is an exercise in adversarial UX. I am constantly fighting with it to get it to stop doing - and pardon my Anglo-Saxon here but I think it's warranted - obnoxious bullshit. Hotkeys, pop-ups (er, sorry, modals), text fields with paste disabled, login walls and other dark patterns... just let me use your website! I get why the hotkey scourge came about, because folks are trying to build apps on a platform that isn't actually a platform. Browsers provide some but not all of the facilities of a real operating system (I'm using "operating system" here in the larger sense of "an integrated software platform that includes a complete toolbox a la Windows, macOS, etc."), so everyone's forced to reinvent square wheels. But understanding it doesn't make the experience as a user any less painful. And although I very much prefer to be able to work from the keyboard whenever possible, hotkeys as they exist on the web today ain't it. They're inconsistent, undiscoverable, and aren't integrated with fundamental UX principles like "don't destroy the user's work" and "let the user recover from mistakes."
- ryandrake 5y ago
  The infuriating part of this is, we keep complaining about all this horrible web UX over and over, on a web forum that a large number of web developers read daily. There are probably web developers browsing this thread right now, maybe reading this very comment, who are actively doing this to the web. Hey! Web Developer Reading This: PLEASE STOP making the web terrible. The very people who can fix this are reading HN. Just stop. Put the keyboard down. Put away the Javascript. Forget those modal pop-ups and newsletter sign-ups. Now do some meditation. Think about what you are doing to the user's experience when you start typing again. I'm really talking to you, mister web developer reading this, who has a JIRA ticket up next in the queue asking you to add a dark pattern to a web site. Please stop. Articulate to your manager why this is horrible, and don't do it. All it takes is people (us, here on HN) to stop doing these things, and things will slowly start getting better.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    > Put away the Javascript. Forget those modal pop-ups and newsletter sign-ups. This would make a lot of careers obsolete though (and even entire companies - I'm sure there are "newsletter popup as a service" startups). It's hard to make someone understand something when their paycheck depends on not understanding it.

by smcl 5y ago

shantnutiwari 5y ago

yeah, and bonus points if then you then spend 10 minutes trying to figure out what happened, and how to undo it

drcongo 5y ago

And most of them don't check to see if the user is also holding down a modifier key, thereby overriding your system keyboard shortcuts. Yes. I _am_ looking at you Google Spreadsheets.

kps 5y ago
Firefox used to not send those to the site js; I think that broke with the Quantum update. Just one of its thousand cuts.
- jandrese 5y ago
  I'm sure that was a "bugfix" where someone complained that website required you to hit CTRL-Q to navigate or something and the browser was consuming the key. Have to make it work like Chrome.

Steltek 5y ago

(I feel like we jumped topics from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895) JIRA's Search is far worse than the regular JIRA hotkeys. The Enter key will incorrectly tab-complete JQL just before executing the search. Meanwhile, the Tab key doesn't tab-complete and instead focuses the Search button (which lets you execute the uncorrupted JQL). You have to actively train yourself out of how everything else works just to avoid going insane. Well, that or use the mouse just to click Search (eww). Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest thing to joy.

ep103 5y ago
Above a certain level of complexity, Jira is the best work tracking and managing solution I've worked with. Its curse, is its developed by Atlassian. A company that was capable of buying Stash, and, somehow, somewhat, turned that codebase into what we now know as bitbucket.
- dljsjr 5y ago
  Other way around. They made Stash in house, they bought BitBucket, and rebranded Stash as BitBucket Server. The BB acquisition happened before Stash was released but Stash was not an acquisition.
  - ep103 5y ago
    I was of the impression that they bought Stash, renamed it to Bitbucket Server, and stopped development, while slowly attempting to reimplement stash code into Bitbucket cloud, one feature at a time?
    - dljsjr 5y ago
      Nope, you can see a condensed version of their acquisition history on their Wiki page for more proof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian#Acquisitions_and_product_announcements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian#Acquisitions_and_pro... When BitBucket was acquired they were cloud only, and when Stash launched it was on-prem only. We used Stash and BitBucket Cloud around that time at the place I was working and I can definitely tell you that on-prem Stash was definitely not a reskinned on-prem BitBucket Cloud; for one I’m pretty sure BitBucket Cloud was written in Python (Django) and Stash was a typical Atlassian Java product.
- hpoe 5y ago
  If your org needs that much complexity it probably is at a point that the time and money wasted waiting for Jira todo things is probably small in comparison to the rest of the wasted efficiency.

sneak 5y ago

I wish I could turn off js's ability to handle keypress events on a per-site basis.

pjc50 5y ago

So many times I've started typing in bash, and then realised that my focus has been on a website instead, which starts doing some ridiculous stuff in response. There's no way to discover hotkey functionality otherwise, of course, because "thou shalt not discover" is a modern UX guideline.

mjevans 5y ago
Underlined hotkeys for menu context and for thought to be hot-path actions dedicated keyboard combinations outside of the menus. Aside from auto-complete searchbars, I think UI functionality peeked in the mid to late 1990s.
- farmerstan 5y ago
  Peak usability was when chrome started hiding zoom buttons for PDFs. I remember at one point to increase the size of a pdf there was no visual indication at all. You had to stumble upon the buttons on the bottom right of the page and they would magically appear. Ever since then designers have decided that looking cool is better than being easy to use and it’s been shit.
mst 5y ago
A non-zero number of websites have followed web twitter in making '?' produce a hotkey display. Naturally tumblr isn't one of them.
- mrguyorama 5y ago
  Except now how am I supposed to know '?' brings up this display?
  - johnsoft 5y ago
    The same way you know you can run any command with `--help`. Most commands anyway. I'm looking at you, netcat

nerdponx 5y ago

Github has (or maybe had) some hotkey that not only opens a clunky browser-based text editor, but also forks the repo under your account. Then you have to go back and manually delete the repo that you didn't intend to fork. Ugh! Also a lot of web-based code editors override the standard Ctrl/Cmd-L shortcut ("go to URL bar") to mean "go to line". It's nice having IDE-like affordances, I guess, but not when it interferes with the basic functionality of the browser.

Joker_vD 5y ago
Isn't the "standard" shortcut for "go to line #" actually Ctrl+G?

clumpthump 5y ago

Squarespace's "ESC to go to Squarespace login" is a huge pain for me as well. I think it's on by default. I CTRL+F pretty often. I press ESC to clear it. I get redirected to Squarespace if I'm on a Squarespace site that hasn't turned off this "feature".

dddddaviddddd 5y ago

Gmail shortcuts are great, until focus jumps away from the search field while typing in it. This happens if you try to search before the page has fully loaded.

remram 5y ago
This happens ALL THE TIME. At first I thought I was touching the touchpad by mistake, but I now have no touchpad and it's definitely Gmail forgetting where I'm typing. Then I have to figure out what actions I may have triggered and undo.

johnsoft 5y ago

This is why desktop apps use the Ctrl key for shortcuts. I'm not sure how that bit of common sense got lost in the transition to webapps.

blacktriangle 5y ago
The lack of Ctrl is sadly a feature for web apps. You don't know which browser, and thus which set of shortcuts your user will be using your app from. However assuming that shortcuts will be prefixed is a pretty safe assumption, so the non-prefixed letters are really the only safe option for web app hotkeys as they form a relatively safe space of shortcuts.

_moof 5y ago

I feel like the modern web is an exercise in adversarial UX. I am constantly fighting with it to get it to stop doing - and pardon my Anglo-Saxon here but I think it's warranted - obnoxious bullshit. Hotkeys, pop-ups (er, sorry, modals), text fields with paste disabled, login walls and other dark patterns... just let me use your website! I get why the hotkey scourge came about, because folks are trying to build apps on a platform that isn't actually a platform. Browsers provide some but not all of the facilities of a real operating system (I'm using "operating system" here in the larger sense of "an integrated software platform that includes a complete toolbox a la Windows, macOS, etc."), so everyone's forced to reinvent square wheels. But understanding it doesn't make the experience as a user any less painful. And although I very much prefer to be able to work from the keyboard whenever possible, hotkeys as they exist on the web today ain't it. They're inconsistent, undiscoverable, and aren't integrated with fundamental UX principles like "don't destroy the user's work" and "let the user recover from mistakes."

ryandrake 5y ago
The infuriating part of this is, we keep complaining about all this horrible web UX over and over, on a web forum that a large number of web developers read daily. There are probably web developers browsing this thread right now, maybe reading this very comment, who are actively doing this to the web. Hey! Web Developer Reading This: PLEASE STOP making the web terrible. The very people who can fix this are reading HN. Just stop. Put the keyboard down. Put away the Javascript. Forget those modal pop-ups and newsletter sign-ups. Now do some meditation. Think about what you are doing to the user's experience when you start typing again. I'm really talking to you, mister web developer reading this, who has a JIRA ticket up next in the queue asking you to add a dark pattern to a web site. Please stop. Articulate to your manager why this is horrible, and don't do it. All it takes is people (us, here on HN) to stop doing these things, and things will slowly start getting better.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > Put away the Javascript. Forget those modal pop-ups and newsletter sign-ups. This would make a lot of careers obsolete though (and even entire companies - I'm sure there are "newsletter popup as a service" startups). It's hard to make someone understand something when their paycheck depends on not understanding it.