1355313 - Keyboard shortcut CTRL+L changed to CTRL+K

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[richard tomkins]

Attachment: CTRL-L broken.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170323105023

Steps to reproduce:

Recently, the Keyboard shortcut CTRL + L has been changed to CTRL + K without an announcement.


Actual results:

CTRL + L does nothing.


Expected results:

For years, I used CTRL + L to insert a Link into a message. That no longer works at all. Now I must use CTRL + K. There was no announcement about this change.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Yes, we changed this in bug 1293048.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to richard tomkins from comment #0)
 
> For years, I used CTRL + L to insert a Link into a message. That no longer
> works at all. Now I must use CTRL + K. There was no announcement about this
> change.

Richard, thank you for your user feedback. We apologize for the inconvenience, and for not announcing the change (at least you succeeded to find the new keyboard shortcut in the menu...).

As Jörg said, we have deliberately changed this in bug 1293048.

Rationale: Both MS Office and Libre Office, two of the most common office packages, are using Ctrl+K to insert a Hyperlink, so in the long run and for new users it will be much easier to remember the same shortcut across all of their applications. (It's Ctrl+K in *Office because Ctrl+L is left-aligned, and Ctrl+H is Search and Replace, both of which are more important than Hyperlink, same for inner characters of the word hyperlink, so the next most intuitive and feasible solution was to take the last character of the word). Moreover, Ctrl+K is now more consistent with Ctrl+Shift+K to remove/discontinue the hyperlink.
And even though Ctrl+L is now unused, we don't usually keep alternative shortcut keys because it's a scarce commodity, so we'll face problems later if we want to use the other key for something else.

If you absolutely want Ctrl+L back, you can use the following addon to change your personal shortcut keys:

> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/dorando-keyconfig/

You may have to restart TB before new keys take effect.
I've tested this and it works for TB 52 to change the shortcut key back to Ctrl+L.

Hope this helps.

Comment 3

[richard tomkins]

I commend the developers for moving toward a single standard. This is an excellent thing to do.

Standards, in their early days are moving definitions, and it's only once they are committed and used by many that they get vetted in a way that shows up the difficult choices that have been made.

In an ideal world, we'd all know everything and there would be no surprises. Without surprises there would be no excitement.

Please, I encourage the developers to take my heavy handed missive about not being told of this change, and treat is as the trite, simplistic, me first, mannerism in which it was cast. I apologize.

I encourage all of you to continue the fine work that you put into this application in your spare moments of your lives.

Best regards, Richard Tomkins