619735 - Help menu should have toplevel "Keyboard shortcuts" entry

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Help Documentation, enhancement)

Description

[Piotr Pastuszka]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; pl; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Ant.com Toolbar 2.0.1 Firefox/3.6.12
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; pl; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101207 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.7 ThunderBrowse/3.3.4

Sorry my poor english.
Now to know List of Keyboard shortcuts user have to press F1 and search "Shortcuts". I think that "Keyboard shortcuts " are so important that should by easier do learn of them. 
Better solution would be that always if that menu position have shortcut then shoult be shown. But that is harder to do, so easier solution shoult by easy to get position in menu "Help".

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
In Menu "Help" should be "Keyboard shortcuts".

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

This looks like a valid request for enhancement.

Reasons/advantages of adding "Keyboard Shortcuts" menu item to help menu:

- In general, we can't guess which help topic a user is looking for, but Keyboard Shortcuts is really something for everyone
- we are doing our users and ourselves a big favor if we make them accessible as easily as possible.
- as we own the menu, we know the exact OS and Product Version and can correctly link to the respective version of the keyboard shortcuts documentation
- we could show keyboard shortcuts in a TB tab
- In fact, if we could trust in the quality of our own list of keyboard shortcuts, the list could even be shipped as part of the product for offline use, to be displayed in a tab.
- Online or offline, we could even highlight new keyboard shortcuts for that os+product version.
- Many other products offer a direct way of accessing keyboard shortcuts of the program
- Arguably, knowing keyboard shortcuts might be even more relevant for a mail/news reader than for other programs (because frequency of interaction might be higher)


Proposed UI:

New menu sequence for Help menu:

Help Topics
Keyboard Shortcuts
Troubleshooting information
What's new
...

Next steps:
- ideally, prepare mockup screenshot of requested UI
- request UI-review from bwinton for new menu, based on adding an attachment with textual description of new UI behaviour (and reference to mockup screenshot)

We might want to wait with this until we have our keyboard shortcuts page sorted out (see tracker Bug 714031).

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

btw, in response to comment 0, I think I've seen existing bugs for "Show keyboard shortcuts in tooltips" and/or "Show keyboard shortcuts in context menus". Check keyboard tracker Bug 713979 to find them. If they are not there, find them and add them to the tracker! ;)

Comment 3

[sreepriya1111]

How to create a mock-up screenshot of the UI ?

Comment 4

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to sreepriya1111 from comment #3)
> How to create a mock-up screenshot of the UI ?

You can use the gimp or something similar.

Comment 5

[sreepriya1111]

Attachment: Mock UI for suggested Help Menu

This is the UI suggested including the Keyboard Shortcuts in the help menu in Thunderbird. I am a beginner. So please do review and suggest me how to get started with it!

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

sreepriya, thanks 4 attaching the mockup ui. Unfortunately you used odg format which cannot be viewed in firefox, so most people will not be able to see your attachment. Worse, I tried and I didn't find anything on the net which will let me convert this easily into something readable (I even renamed .odg into .zip, but the picture inside is TablePreview1.svm which I still can't read, and can't find a reader for.)
Please export/convert your graphics with the program you used, into something readable by firefox or at least average graphic viewers like irfanview, like .png, .jpg, .bmp, or .svg (in order of preference). I did see the mini-preview inside (it's thumbnail.png) and it looks ok, but it's too small as a preview.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I've sent a pm to sreepriya with detailed starting points for getting into the code.

Comment 8

[sreepriya1111]

I added the code in baseMenuOverlay.xul for the necessary addition of Keyboard Shortcuts and I build the code and I got the output. But when you click on keyboard shortcuts, it doesn't lead to the keyboard shortcuts page. How shall I get it done?

Comment 9

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

sreepriya, I'm glad you succeeded into the code. Pls add the difference between old and new baseMenuOverlay.xul as an attachment to this bug, as a text file in patch format. For a similar example, see my patch in https://bug525987.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=456618

Without the patch, we don't know what you have changed so we cannot review or help.
(I'll be away for the weekend.)

On Windows, I used a program called "WinDiff" to create the patch. You'll probably need a similar program for Linux, just google for alternatives, like http://www.quora.com/Is-there-something-like-WinDiff-for-Linux.

Comment 10

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to sreepriya1111 from comment #8)
> I added the code in baseMenuOverlay.xul for the necessary addition of
> Keyboard Shortcuts and I build the code and I got the output. But when you
> click on keyboard shortcuts, it doesn't lead to the keyboard shortcuts page.
> How shall I get it done?

sreepriya1111 do you still need help ? hg -diff would do it for instance, or just gnu diff if on linux oe macos.

Comment 11

[sreepriya1111]

Attachment: Addition of keyboard shortcuts in Help Menu

The patch is for adding a menu for keyboard shortcuts in Help menu. But I couldn,t find out where should I edit to specify the URL of the keyboard shortcuts that will lead to that page.

Comment 12

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I am communicating with Sreepriya to get the patch right, she'll post a new version soon.

Comment 13

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #12)
> I am communicating with Sreepriya to get the patch right, she'll post a new
> version soon.

any progress on this ?

Comment 14

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I'd argue anyone looking for keyboard shortcuts would find them as is. The link is right there in the Help Content page. Feels redundant to have a main level menu item pointing to a sub page.

Comment 15

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul] from comment #13)
> (In reply to Thomas D. from comment #12)
> > I am communicating with Sreepriya to get the patch right, she'll post a new
> > version soon.
> 
> any progress on this ?

I did communicate about the patch with Sreepriya on Skype shortly after my comment 12, but I think she's been distracted. Not sure if she'll proceed on this one.

Comment 16

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Sreepriya, do you still want to continue your work on this patch?

Comment 17

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

No reply to comment 16 -> unassigning

Comment 18

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Migration from support.mozillamessaging.com to support.mozilla.org messed up TB's knowledge base big time, with many articles ending up in unintuitive places, version history lost, contributors history in documents lost, complete draft articles lost (ready for publication), ...

(In reply to Magnus Melin from comment #14)
> I'd argue anyone looking for keyboard shortcuts would find them as is. The
> link is right there in the Help Content page. Feels redundant to have a main
> level menu item pointing to a sub page.

After the KB bombshell destruction described above, this no longer applies. As an expert user of TB, I took really long to find Keyboard Shortcuts hidden somewhere deep down in all the wrong category (searching works, but doesn't reveal the category either).

Fast and efficient UX/UI is one of the main reasons for users to still use a mail client application. Keyboard Shortcuts are a very important part of that efficient UX/UI and they deserve to be advertised and systematically presented. Some application functions are actually undiscoverable without the keyboard shortcuts documentation (e.g. Shift modifier to compose in non-default format). Keyboard shortcuts isn't just another help page, it's a very essential part of the program. Plus all the reasons detailed in comment 0... This little link in the help menu has an excellent cost-benefit ratio and should be implemented.

Comment 19

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Maybe we could have keyboard shortcuts on the top level too, like it used to be?

Comment 20

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Magnus Melin from comment #19)
> Maybe we could have keyboard shortcuts on the top level too, like it used to
> be?

Yes :) List of keyboard shortcuts should be offered on top level, both in the Help menu (this bug) and in its own tile on the Thunderbird support page.

More points in favor of this bug:

- Help menu currently has only 5 entries of which 4 are probably rarely used, iow users really only ever get here when looking for help. So it really doesn't hurt to add another one which is actually useful, even for repeated lookups (more so as we currently do not have any systematic way of documenting changes in shortcuts across TB versions, except updating the main list).

- New users in the mobile everything touch-screen age might not even be aware that there's something like keyboard shortcuts which can help them to work more efficiently. We are really doing TB a favor by advertising this in-app as one of the main features which make a desktop mailing app so much superior over clumsy and inefficient webmail.

Comment 21

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #20)
> More points in favor of this bug:
> 

- Even the latest version of Firefox (32.0.2), usually quite radical in removing menu items, still has a dedicated "Keyboard shortcuts" entry in the Help menu (also because some keyboard shortcuts like Alt+Home for start page can ONLY be found from external documentation; same problem in TB).

Comment 23

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #14)

I'd argue anyone looking for keyboard shortcuts would find them as is. The
link is right there in the Help Content page. Feels redundant to have a main
level menu item pointing to a sub page.

7 years later, I'm happy to see that Magnus himself has now implemented the "Keyboard Shortcuts" help menu entry as advocated in this bug. Good ideas never die...