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Here's another total usability fail: Tab sends the e-mail you're currently writing instead of indenting text. Everywhere else tab indents text, and when you wri
by mixmax 13y ago
Here's another total usability fail: Tab sends the e-mail you're currently writing instead of indenting text. Everywhere else tab indents text, and when you write an e-mail in gmail you'd expect it to act consistently with how it's used everywhere else.
Start writing in gmail, hit tab to indent some text. Congratulations you've now sent half an e-mail to you boss....
I can't fathom who thought this was a good idea.
- cmircea 13y agoNitpicker's corner: it doesn't actually send the email, it focuses the send button.
- richardjs 13y agoI don't think it's nitpicking. It's the difference between the standard way web forms work and Gmail overriding a known behavior to do something else. That said, after you hit tab, you'll probably type a word and hit space, which will then click the button and send off the message.
- kevinpet 13y agoI had no idea what he was talking about until the replies. You and grandparent are wrong. Standard behavior on web forms is tab moves you to the next element. You are expecting gmail to act like a desktop app, and maybe you could make the argument that it should, but that's a different issue.
- gcr 13y agoWe can definitely make the case that it used to and that it doesn't anymore. Sending an email isn't like filling in several text boxes on a web form, it's composing/editing a lengthy message that often has proper formatting like indentation.
- 3825 13y agoI actually use tab -> enter to send and I find it quite convenient. Why are people complaining about this when we've all tacitly admitted top posting? IMO bigger problems are that email ought to be plain text by default and replies ought to go in the bottom (with three dots on the top if necessary). Sorry if I made anyone mad. Now you know how I felt reading this post.
- serginho 13y agoCtrl + Enter is much more efficient for me.
- 3825 13y agoHow long has Gmail supported Ctrl + Enter? I agree. It is pretty sweet. Now I can go back and forth between Outlook and Gmail!
- LocalPCGuy 13y agoCtrl-Enter is the one keyboard shortcut I wish I could disable. It is my most common mis-hit, usually when pasting something into an email and then hitting enter to advance to the next line. I also miss the ability to tab within the compose box, but on the web I pretty much always assume Tab is not going to indent text I'm typing.
- Munksgaard 13y agoIf you're replying to an email you can quickly press Ctrl+a, Ctrl+end to go to the bottom, for all your bottom-posting needs.
- pbreit 13y agoThe standard way that web forms have worked forever is that tab moves focus to the next element.
- mongol 13y agoYes that is true. But what is the standard way to insert a tab?
- esalman 13y agoTab+Return sends email.
- mixmax 13y agoThanks - I didn't notice that. After having mistakenly sent a few embarrassing half e-mails I've stopped using tab altogether in gmail for fear of doing it again. When I indent text it's spaces instead of tab - unlike anywhere else. This proves the point that it's terrible UI though...
- jdavis703 13y agoThe to: field is always the last one I fill out to prevent half-baked thoughts from escaping.
- tomkarlo 13y agoI highly recommend turning on the "Undo Send" extension in the Labs part of settings. It lets you choose to undo settings for ~5 seconds after you press send. It has saved my bacon countless times, not because I hit send accidentally, but because I realize I want to add one more thing or recipient to an email.
- mherdeg 13y agoHeh. Imagining this UX patch 25 years ago: "I highly recommend turning on the 'Undo Irradiate' feature on the Therac-25. It lets you undo irradiation settings for a patient for ~5 seconds after you press irradiate. It has saved my patients countless times, not because the UI tricks me into irradiating patients with the wrong settings, but because I realize I want to add one more dose."
- tomkarlo 13y agoYes, because sending an email by accident is just like irradiating a cancer patient to death. Obviously, they've made it easy to send emails (pressing tab then enter) but that means that some folks send them by accident. But that's an acceptable trade, because it doesn't kill people.
- w1ntermute 13y agoOne easy solution to this (and many other general email mishaps) is to enable Gmail's undo button for sending email: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1284885?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1284885?hl=en
- cmircea 13y agoThat's a workaround of sorts, not a solution.
- w1ntermute 13y agoIt solves the problem for the most part, which is what's important here. We're not building a rocket.
- sanjeevmundluru 13y agoThis shouldn't BE a problem in the first place... and that's just the problem.
- jonny_eh 13y agoand there shouldn't be corruption in government. Why is that relevant? Problems either exist or they don't.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rza 13y agoI wouldn't call it a total fail. Tab moves focus to the next input element on almost all web forms, in this case the send button. It allows you to send the message without moving your mouse in a fashion consistent with how we use web forms, much like how I can submit this comment with tab+enter.
- DanBC 13y ago> Tab moves focus to the next input element on almost all web forms, In almost all software, not just web forms. It's only text editors that don't use this.
- saraid216 13y ago> Everywhere else tab indents text Everywhere else that's an explicit text editor indents text. This comment field? Hitting tab goes to the reply button.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- missing_cipher 13y agoThe default behavior for "Tab" on the web is to move to the next element on the Tab order.
- oinksoft 13y agoThe default behavior for Tab in rich text editors has been to insert a tabstop for quite some time. I think this is just a casualty of goog.editor.Editor's unconventional default behavior, which is to tab out of the field. If that is truly an oversight (not overriding this behavior), it says a lot about how the Gmail project is being run these days, because previously they did override this.
- oinksoft 13y agoJust wanted to add it is goog.editor.Field, not goog.editor.Editor. When I wrote that, I told myself "don't call it goog.editor.Editor," a typo I often make in my code. I guess it's like when people look at something and then crash their car into it. Sorry about that.
- esrauch 13y agoIs it really unconventional though? Tab for navigation is the default behavior for HTML form inputs and contenteditable. I can't think of a website that I use that has input boxes that have tab do indent actually.
- oinksoft 13y agoI think you'd be hard-pressed to find a widely used rich text editor, be it TinyMCE, CKEditor, YUI Editor or ExtJS' HtmlEditor that doesn't map the Tab key to insert a tabstop or a number of non-breaking spaces. goog.editor.Field is absolutely in the minority in that regard. There are good design reasons for this. The goog.editor package is designed to be modular. This tab-to-indent behavior is instead provided by the goog.editor.plugins.SpacesTabHandler plugin. As I mention before, I find it questionable that the GMail developers elected to omit this plugin. I'm not suggesting that there are some fools on the project who can't read an API. Rather, it strongly indicates that GMail is catering less and less to any approximation of the "power user", and assuming that most emails could just as well be composed in a <textarea>.
- Semaphor 13y agoI love it that way. They are not supposed to break normal behavior by changing how tab works normally in a browser. I use Tab and Shift+Tab all time.
- nollidge 13y agoDoes any web mail not do this? And did Gmail ever not do this?
- mynameishere 13y agoYahoo mail has tab-style tabs. And I think it's still considerably more popular than gmail. Gmail has some huge advantages, but they're all business-y stuff, like free POP. Yahoo's interface is perfectly good.
- twistedpair 13y agoAt least they added Alt+Enter to send the email now. That's been the Outlook default since the start of time. Now I can use the same commands at work and at home. Perfect.
- taigeair 13y agoI actually never tab in my emails. I use line breaks instead and have learned to do tab enter for sending emails. For me, it's a big time saver to do that instead of having to move my cursor to the send button. I didn't realise it was causing problems for other people.
- serginho 13y agoUse spaces.
- drummer32 13y agoThis is false. Not only Tab doesn't automatically send the email but Google has not overwrittern anything. This is the default behaviour on a web page. Pressing Tab selects the next interactive element on a web page (a link, form elemnts etc.) and pressing space/enter activates it. I'm guessing you press tab expecting to indent something, write a word and then press space to begin the next one which actually sends the message. This is how forms on a webpage work and AFAIR this is how the compose function in gmail always worked. I think i have seen a couple of WYSIWYG text editors that "capture" the tab keypress and actually ident the text but this is far from the norm.
- dm2 13y agoI often write emails in Google Documents then copy and paste to Gmail to get around these quirks. The problem with that is that Google Docs and Gmail have completely different default styles and features. The bulleted lists are not compatible and bold font gets all messed up when you try to edit it (like the normal and bold switch). Boooooooooooooooo.
- airbnbinterview 13y agoOh man is that why I keep accidentally sending half written emails!?
- gallinaponedora 13y agoThe irony of discussing good UI in hacker news
- scholia 13y agoHN's UI works fine. Unlike Gmail's....
- iamshs 13y agoI have to bring another ruse to surface: I could not find where the "cached" option went when they changed the search interface. Right now, it is buried inside another drop down menu near the website name, and guess what, it is the only one option. Why cannot they have it the previous way? Just mention it right next to the result. Crazy UI to me, guess the G+ designer they hired is working out good for them, and am sure they have 11 use cases for justifying this. Another big big problem is the "Quick VIew" option for the pdf or doc files in search results. Earlier, if I did not want to download it, I could just use "quick view" option. But they took it away, and now I have to be logged into my gmail account and it takes to google drive, so as to let me simply view the document. Crazy. And this is why i turned to mozilla, their pdf.js is still lacking...but I will support it such as it will be up to par or even better someday.