Hijacking CTRL+K sucks, too! It's the shortcut used to focus the browser search input in Firefox, but the industry has seemingly decided it's a great way to launch a command palette.
I recently implemented this, and the users loved it, though I was disappointed to hear it may have frustrated a usually silent group.
I'm open to feedback! What would be a better approach? Please don’t just suggest “no custom shortcuts for any web app”—people spend 60-70% of their workday using the UI components my team maintains. While random sites hijacking shortcuts is definitely frustrating, in our case, the pros seem to outweigh the cons.
Maybe allowing users to disable or customize shortcuts could be a solution? Or would that be over-engineering?
Honestly, I think the web platform could use a standard API for defining shortcuts, with browsers providing a UI to manage or disable them. Maybe I'm still over-engineering here.
I think Github handled this well by letting you choose between a few canned shortcuts, or disabling the feature altogether [1]. Since I seldom print, I opted to bind the command palette to "CTRL + P"
> Honestly, I think the web platform could use a standard API for defining shortcuts, with browsers providing a UI to manage or disable them. Maybe I'm still over-engineering here.
I'd agree with this sentiment. It's hard, but an obvious (IMO) pain point that has numerous sites reinventing the wheel and needing to introduce some state to save user preferences.
> I was disappointed to hear it may have frustrated a usually silent group.
This group isn't usually silent (far from it), they're just not usually your users.
If you're building a web app a la Notion, Figma, Google Docs, Slack, or anything similar: just ignore the "the web should just be documents that strictly use the platform" complaints. Ensure you build in the required accessibility hooks (since those don't come natively to most custom work), but your users will thank you for accommodating their specific needs better than the platform does.
If you're building a web page that mostly presents information... yeah, maybe listen to the people here.
The main thing you're seeing here is that there's a subset of developers who haven't ever really liked the idea that the web became the primary means of deploying applications.
The "press again to fall back to the browser's key binding" solution many sites use for ^F isn't perfect, and won't work for all scenarios, but it definitely helps.
> Honestly, I think the web platform could use a standard API for defining shortcuts, with browsers providing a UI to manage or disable them. Maybe I'm still over-engineering here.
I think this is really cool and would also allow some interesting features...
- Easier using random input devices. Game engines like Unity with their newest input manager abstracts everything away. Bind inputs not only to standard navigation actions but also app-defined shortcuts.
- Custom UI provided by the browser based on available shortcuts. PCs could get a quick actions bar and phones could have a shortcut drop-down menu exposing functionality.
- If there is an API for enabling/disabling shortcuts the browser can provide context-sensitive shortcut suggestions like some of the profession creation tools like Fusion360 [iirc] where available shortcuts are shown in the status bar.
At least in Firefox there is still a difference even if you don't have a separate search bar. Ctrl-K goes to the URL bar as a search in your default search engine while Ctrl-L goes to the URL bar in whatever mode it currently is in. This mostly matters if you disable searching by default in the URL bar but still search from the URL bar, although there is also a visual indication that you are searching with Ctrl-K in the default configuration.
I keep them separate for two reasons: one privacy, and another preference:
1. If I'm interacting with the URL/address input, I'm either entering a full URL, or searching through my local history to jump to a previously-visited page (or, in Firefox, a tab I may have open on another device). I don't want that shipped off to my search provider for autocomplete suggestions.
2. If I'm interacting with the search input, I want autocomplete suggestions. Additionally, because it retains the value of the last term I searched for, I can use it as a shortcut to jump back to the results if I no longer have the tab handy.
It prevents you from leaking data in cases where you like live search suggestions (like completions from your search engine based on partial text entered) but didn't want your search engine recording all the URLs you visit outside of search.
I'm open to feedback! What would be a better approach? Please don’t just suggest “no custom shortcuts for any web app”—people spend 60-70% of their workday using the UI components my team maintains. While random sites hijacking shortcuts is definitely frustrating, in our case, the pros seem to outweigh the cons.
Maybe allowing users to disable or customize shortcuts could be a solution? Or would that be over-engineering?
Honestly, I think the web platform could use a standard API for defining shortcuts, with browsers providing a UI to manage or disable them. Maybe I'm still over-engineering here.
Would really appreciate hearing others’ thoughts!