1744576 - (longkeypress) [meta] Holding down any keyboard shortcut/hotkey should never result in multiple repetitive actions

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[johnkw]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:94.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/94.0

Steps to reproduce:

I originally noticed this general problem in bug 1705824, which has been fixed by correcting the database corruption problems. However the general UI issue remains.

This is a major usability problem in several cases, especially for users with less accessibility/dexterity.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Thanks John for collecting the related bugs here (so far I had tried to cross-link them, but this is better!). I tend to agree with that, especially for message-related shortcuts. This represents a general issue of ux-error-prevention even for users without accessibility issues. Holding down a keyboard shortcut results in uncontrolled repetition of the same action, which for many scenarios won't be really useful, and should not be supported as a modus operandi, apart from causing the accessibility issues which you mentioned. Although I'd suspect that the accessibility problems might be better solved at OS level by changing the respective accessibility settings (I've seen those to be very elaborate on Win10). I.e. if you're always holding down keys for too long, maybe better to change your general OS keyboard settings to wait longer before accepting a key.

We might even be able to change this at a single spot somewhere in the toolkit implementation for XUL <key> which still handles most of our keyboard shortcuts. Per-command might be a lot more work, but we might want to start with some of the harmful commands at least.

We should be careful not to interfere with some of our shortcuts which rely on long keypress, like holding down BACKSPACE or DEL in an empty recipient row in composition to delete it.

Also, for smaller editing keyboard shortcuts (like holding Backspace to remove multiple or all recipients in composition), I think repetition is acceptable and useful (your text editor behaves the same).

Comment 2

[johnkw]

Thanks, yes, I agree with backspace in a recipient box being different not only because that's the generally accepted behavior, but also because undo is simple, and you know where to look. For the destructive hotkey ones especially (like CTRL-W), it may be difficult to even notice the repeat happened when it originally happened. It might not be until hours later that you realize you lost something, at which point undo is perhaps no longer an option. (Also yes, ideally this would be fixed as globally as possible, since this pattern also impacts Firefox.)

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to johnkw from comment #2)

Thanks, yes, I agree with backspace in a recipient box being different not only because that's the generally accepted behavior, but also because undo is simple, and you know where to look.

Unfortunately, you can only undo deleting text in the address input (before pillification), but you cannot undo deleting pills - Bug 1721682 .

For the destructive hotkey ones especially (like CTRL-W)

I wouldn't say that Ctrl+W is destructive. You can actually undo closing tabs with Ctrl+Shift+T (as in Firefox). Closing more tabs than intended is annoying and might lose a bit of context (like messages which you kept open because you wanted to act on them), but apart from that, there's no real dataloss, as you'll still be able to reopen all those tabs if you remember them.

it may be difficult to even notice the repeat happened when it originally happened. It might not be until hours later that you realize you lost something, at which point undo is perhaps no longer an option.

Yes, e.g. accidentally holding A for Archive is clearly more than a nuisance, it's pseudo-destructive as you might think your messages are gone for good.