Customizable keyboard shortcuts

I only discovered today that the button with a keyboard icon at the bottom right of the page only has a query function and cannot be customized. :joy:

I believe there needs to be a place that allows administrators to adjust default shortcuts and users to customize their own shortcut settings. :wink:

Moreover, this could also resolve many existing and past issues on the forum :slightly_smiling_face:, such as ā€œsome people think Ctrl+F should enable browser search rather than site search, which doesn’t align with habits, yet others hope Ctrl+F triggers site searchā€, ā€œsome users report misoperations due to the Ctrl+Enter shortcut causing accidental posts, but others consider Ctrl+Enter a fairly standard shortcut for postingā€ and many other problems (honestly, I never thought the latter would become an issue until I encountered someone using Ctrl+Enter for line breaks and Enter for posting…)

2 Likes

In the context of a single site, in makes sense. Now, let’s hope those users don’t use multiple Discourse sites. Having different shortcuts for forums using the same software sounds like a frustrating experience :sweat_smile:

4 Likes

Yes, this is why it needs to allow administrators to set default values while allowing users to customize according to their preferences. :slightly_smiling_face:

Some games offer a solution where the code table for shortcut keys can be imported and exported, allowing users to maintain their accustomed settings across different installments of the same series. This, of course, excludes newly added customized content in sequels or mods. However, implementing this feature in Discourse might be challenging, and storing shortcut data for all users would also consume server storage space, so I am uncertain about the necessity of this functionality.

1 Like

From a technical standpoint, perhaps, but

If you stores only changed shortcuts, it would be negligible, especially since the majority of users won’t bother change their settings anyways, right?

1 Like

Yeah, but I’m considering whether someone might exploit this feature to leave a large amount of junk data on the website server as a prank (if that website hasn’t modified the clean_up_inactive_users_after_days setting).

There are like 100 keyboard shortcuts. It will have no impact whatsoever.

When a large number of fake accounts are registered in batches, these data accumulate incrementally. Although, under the same number of attempts, the data generated by this method is negligible compared to uploading images to profile pictures and information cards. :laughing: