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"GitHub" Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Software
(www.mistys-internet.website)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Programming
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When one clicks command+F while on the git blame, GitHub throws up their own search box. Not rendering everything at once is something a lot of stuff does.
Honestly, the ability to override menu keys is really a long-running flaw in browser UI, IMHO.
Firefox acquired a not-so-obvious way to disable that for a given site:
Click the "lock icon" to the left of the URL in the URL bar. Click "connection secure". Click "more information". In the window that comes up, click the "permissions" tab. On that page, there's an option to "override keyboard shortcuts". You can click "Block", and it'll prevent that particular website from overriding your keybindings.
This had been a long-running pet peeve until I ran into someone explaining how to disable it. I still bet that a ton of people who can't find the option put up with that. Like, lemmy Web UI keyboard shortcuts clash with GTK emacs-lite keybindings, drives me nuts. Hitting "Control-E" to go to the end of the line instead inserts some Markdown stuff by default.
fwiw in the case of Ctrl+F, you can usually press it twice in a row to invoke the browser's search instead. Discourse forums are common use cases.
Thank you for sharing that! It drives me up a wall when I tap a standard browser shortcut only to have a web site intercept it and make something else happen instead.
They have a reason to do so here though. OP evaded their search box and couldn't find the content. Because it's not fully rendered. Because code files can get big, and rendering them to DOM with inline highlighting and hover actions, sidebar with infos, and interactivity becomes a performance problem. So they implement partial rendering / virtual scrolling.
So, I've got no problem with having page-specific functionality and allocating some kind of space of keybindings to them, right? Like, okay. Say that browsers reserved the Control-Alt prefix for webpages, and then had a list of functions that webpages could implement, and when they do, adding a visible button in a toolbar and having a hover tip to find those. That visible toolbar would solve any issue of discoverability of such functionality on a webpage (and by implementing that in the browser, the browser could choose to have a more-minimal form, like just an indicator that a page supports keybindings.) So the webpage doesn't have to grab the browser's keybindings. Or maybe we introduce a "browser button" or something, the way Microsoft did the Windows key.
But what I don't like is having access to native functionality blocked by webpages. I don't think that they should have overlapping keybinding space.
Emacs has a shitton of keybindings, users who heavily configure it, and a ton of add-on software that needs keybindings. What they did was to reserve some keybinding space for the editor, some for major modes, some for minor modes, and some for user-specified keybindings. These all don't collide, so that the user doesn't get functionality blocked by another piece of software:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html%5Fnode/elisp/Key-Binding-Conventions.html
I get that websites need to have keybinding space, and have a legit reason to do so. But I don't think that they should share keybinding space with the browser's native functionality. If we want to have a "search" shortcut, hey, that's cool. But lets leave the browser-native functionality available.
In Firefox, I have:
Alt-f for find. By default, this is Control-f, but normally both Control- and Alt- are reserved for the browser, and I've swapped the Control and Alt prefixes so that the menu keys don't crash into the GTK emacs-lite keybindings. Some websites override this, which is really annoying if I'm trying to navigate around using conventional search; in emacs, it's common for users to use search constantly to navigate around in a document.
Slash. This opens a mini-find, because I'm using vimium, but only if I don't have a text-editing widget active, in which case the OS's text editor gets it.
So I've got two different search keybindings and both are inaccessible at various points, because other software packages want to use keybinding space and there's no convention for avoiding collisions.
My preference would be that there should be keybinding space for Firefox itself, keybinding space for the OS to use in things like text widgets, keybinding space for the OS (Microsoft dealt with this by adding and reserving the Windows key and mostly using that, except for traditional pre-existing conventions like Alt-F4 or Alt-Enter), keybinding space for OS add-ons, binding space for Firefox add-ons, and keybinding space for websites, and that these shouldn't overlap (and insofar as possible, and I realize that this isn't always possible for non-modified keybindings, to not change based on modality, like "this functionality isn't available if you have a text widget active").
Neat! Does that also block right-click capture?
In Firefox, you can also override right-click capture by holding shift while right-clicking.
I don't know; I'd guess not, but haven't tried to find out.