Unnecessary shortcuts?

Recently I felt some shortcuts in Dynalist are unnecessary and creates more troubles than they help.

I think we made the mistake thinking that most actions needs a shortcut for it. We assumed “yes” rather than “no”. For something like going to the file pane, there’s a shortcut Ctrl+Shift+F, which could be better used as an augmented version of Ctrl+F (search vs search everywhere). Plus opening/closing the file pane is probably something that’s not used that frequently.

Of course, there are things that needs a keyboard shortcut without a doubt, such like collapse or mark as completed.

Some shortcuts that I think are unncessary:

  • Ctrl+L for marking LaTeX (conflicts with going to the address bar in Chrome)
  • Ctrl+Shift+F for toggling file pane
  • Ctrl+Shift+B for toggling bookmark pane
  • Ctrl+Alt+S for toggling spell checker

Would love to get more ideas from you guys!

1 Like

I rarely do searches for something that requires autocomplete from the omnibar, and I typically wouldn’t switch away from a document that I’m working on without making a new tab, so I would suggest keeping this, or changing it to ctrl+m for math.

I don’t use it that much, and I usually end up re-opening the file manager.

It’ be nice if it appeared on the right side via a shortcut.

I feel like someone who is annoyed by this would already have this disabled it in their browser, would change the language, or prefer to add a word to their dictionary. Since I program a lot, I type out a bunch of strange “words”, but haven’t had much of an issue with it in Google Chrome.

Not much else comes to mind.

1 Like

I totally think that way too!

I think users should definitely be able to set shortcuts for as many actions as possible, but: The four actions you mentioned shouldn’t have a shortcut set by default.

The kind of people who are going to use keyboard shortcuts to that extent are the kind of people who know exactly what shortcuts they want and will set them anyway?

Setting shortcuts won’t really help discovery (in a meaningful way) anyway, and any discovery via the help sidebar on the right won’t be affected as users can see the action (if need to set a shortcut they like).

1 Like

I actually submitted a ‘bug report’ asking to change the LaTeX shortcut.

To try to help illustrate my use case: I usually have many Chrome windows open, each for a different project/task. I often open up Dynalist in each and navigate to particular parts. Dynalist documents are ephemerally useful, not ‘pinned’ or anything.

2 Likes

Oh yeah, that’s a genius idea. For some reason we had to give every action a default shortcut. I remember in some complex softwares (e.g. the IDE I’m using now), some action can be customized to have a shortcut but doesn’t come with a shortcut by default. Now I understand why… :relieved:

2 Likes