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Comment by duncanawoods | Hacker News Reader

From creating a few complicated web editors, the things I would find really useful in a (non-react specific) keyboard shortcut support library:

- help identifying "web-safe" keyboard short-cuts which are not taken by the OS or the browser

- handling of different short-cut schemes for OS/browser combination

- easy handling of common system conventions e.g. f2 on windows/ubuntu is often rename but probably not on macos

- handling reduced keyboards e.g. not sure what the state of on-screen or iPad keyboards is these days but they certainly used to lack a lot of keys making any short-cut heavy app almost unusable

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You can override "web safe" keyboard shortcuts (for example, "CTRL+S") in a pretty standard way, with or without a library. The biggest issue I think is the expected behavior for the user. If I press CTRL+S, do I expect the same HTML dialog or something custom in the app. Depends on the experience.

For different OS/browsers, the library I wrote for react shortcuts (see comment history for this post) handles this behind-the-scenes. CTRL/CMD are interchangeable depending on MacOS vs anything else.

Handling educed shortcuts is an interesting point I don't believe a lot of people are exploring. With increasingly complex apps being built that often rely on memorizing shortcuts, what alternatives exist beyond good design? I don't know the answer myself but am open to thoughts on how that might be achieved.

> With increasingly complex apps being built that often rely on memorizing shortcuts, what alternatives exist beyond good design?

I think it's key to make the shortcuts discoverable inline. Maybe by default, maybe with a modifier pressed, every button and menu item should show the shortcut for it.

Also take a look at the experience in Spacemacs, where you compose multiple keys for a shortcut and if you pause you get a pop-up showing possibilities (eg press , to get major mode specific, then pause to see options, press x for text, then pause to see all the options for the next letter. Then when you know it you just quickly hit ,xi) (I vaguely remember someone else wrote this and Spacemacs popularized it, but I can't find the name)

Interesting to me is that a lot of native apps have similar functionality with the Alt key to navigate menus. Certain menu options would have an underlined character and you'd hit that character to select it like in Spacemacs.

I never use those in apps outside of Spacemacs. I think the bottom bar succinctly showing you all the options when you hit space/comma really makes discoverability a lot easier than in traditional apps.

There are not only OS and browser keyboard shortcuts but also assistive technology shortcuts like screen readers.

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