On 2016-03-13 19:49, John Erling Blad wrote:
A lot of things are much simpler in VisualEditor, but a lot of stuff is
harder to do or simply does not work. It doesn't matter if things look
shiny if people use a lot more time doing the same task. One area is
editing from the keyboard, how can we do all the same things at least
equally fast - not just that we can do them?
At least speaking for the OOjs UI library (on top of which
VisualEditor's interface is built), I can assure you that a lot of
effort goes into making all actions available from keyboard only, and
making our interfaces at least no worse than the "native" ones. I think
the VisualEditor team shares these principles.
There are some things which take more key presses (you just have fewer
"degrees of freedom" when instead of arbitrarily many buttons, you have
a finite set of keyboard keys, especially after you exclude keys
ordinarily used for typing text), and things which are slightly
different than native ones (for example, dropdown lists are different in
every OS and every browser, and we try not to do anything
browser-specific, so our dropdowns are probably different yet). But we
try our best.
We insert a lot of top-notices (article marks), and edit them, but how can
we do it fast? Yes we can add top-notices as templates, but they are hardly
fast to add that way.
This is supposed to be doable from the keyboard:
1. Type '{{' to open template insert dialog
2. Type the template name (the right field should be focused), confirm
with Enter
3. Press Tab a few times until focus moves to the 'Insert' button,
confirm with Enter
...but, something is definitely not right at the last step. I just tried
and the focus moved through a few invisible buttons first; filed this as
T129791 [1]. Another improvement would be to be able to confirm the
dialog with Ctrl+Enter from any field, David actually implemented this
recently [2] and it should reach Wikipedias next week.
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T129791
[2] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/274984/
We link and delink articles, but how can we do it fast?
To remove a link from some text, select it and press Ctrl+\ (that's the
backslash) or Ctrl+M. (This also removes any other formatting, like bold
or italic.)
To add or edit a link, press Ctrl+K with the text selected. You can just
confirm with Enter, or edit it and confirm them.
By the way, there's a list of all available keyboard shortcuts built
into VisualEditor – it's under the '?' button on the toolbar, or under
the Ctrl+? shortcut :)
--
Bartosz Dziewoński
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