518535 - Add keyboard shortcuts for correcting spelling

Status: NEW

(Core :: Spelling checker, enhancement)

Description

[kuro68k]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
Build Identifier: 3.5.3

There should be keyboard shortcuts for correcting spelling.

For example, if the user types a sentence with a misspelt word, they should not have to move the cursor back to that word but rather just hit a shortcut and have that word either auto-corrected or bring up a list of suggestions.

This will save time for people who do a lot of typing, e.g. in email. Having to move your cursor takes time (you might have to use the mouse too) and breaks your flow.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Type a sentence with a misspelt word
2.Move cursor or mouse to word
3.Correct it with menu

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Sounds like a valid request. Marking as confirmed for now. We should get feedback from UX for the correct handling.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

dupe of bug 287935?
or should it just be dependent?

Comment 4

[Zhenshuo Fang (:fang) - Firefox UX Team]

I can see this shortcut useful for some people who edit text all the time. But I'm not sure one click and all your mistakes go away is what most people need. Because you still need to go back and make sure it correct the mistake the way you wanted it to be corrected. I can see this more of an add-on than a main feature.

Comment 5

[Luke deGruchy]

On macOS, it's now impossible to invoke the context menu from the keyboard in Firefox, since the functionality was removed due to a competing keyboard shortcut, but users don't have the ability to re-enable this feature:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435164

After searching I found no spell checking plugin for Firefox.

Chrome has the Command-Colon (Command-Shift-;) shortcut to bring up a spell checking dialog accessible by using only the keyboard.

Safari on macOS invokes the iOS-like autocorrect which also allows users to spell check while keeping their hands on

So Firefox, unlike its competing browsers on macOS offers no way to spell check using only the keyboard.  Asking users to constantly reach for the mouse to spell check as they're typing results in poor ergonomics and is vastly inefficient.

Also, consider the fact that many of us are not simply filing a quick comment but are working in Google Docs or other online word processors for much of the working day, many times editing documents created or edited by others and many times correcting their typos.

So, I propose either one of the following solutions, any of which would be infinitely better than the status quo:

1) Enable a configurable (or hard-coded to SHIFT-F10) keyboard shortcut to invoke the context menu at the text cursor location (as opposed to where the mouse pointer is):  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1385592
2) Add functionality similar to the Chrome shortcut to bring up the spell checking dialog with Command colon or some other shortcut)
3) Use the same text field API that Safari does to bring up autocorrect.