On the subject of consistent keyboard shortcuts, does anyone here have a copy of the complete Common User Access documents? What I can find online (linked to from Wikipedia below) is incomplete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Alternatively, I'm also interested in a comprehensive listing of Common User Access keyboard shortcuts. Without the original documents themselves, I'm not sure how comprehensive (or accurate) what I'm seeing online is.

I'm so frustrated these days with a lack of keyboard controls in GUI applications. It's like developers just want to limit you to being able to operate their software with one single finger. And most of the time they're bad at UX, so you wind up not having coherent workflows even with a mouse.

I'm a huge fan of vim keybinds. The concept is fantastic, you've got a panel of switches in front of you that you can make do anything, why limit it to being a typewriter? That said, ctrl keys are fine. I can live with it. It works. If that's all I can get, please do it. Any desktop application should have at a bare minimum Ctrl shortcuts for everything.

> But in our data set, a staggering 64% of CommandBar users have used at least one keyboard shortcut and 20% have used keyboard shortcuts at least 10 ten times.

That sounds like 44% of users have triggered a keyboard shortcut by mistake.

User-modifiable shortcuts plus a user willing to modify them are the key to happiness. It lets you iterate until you are satisfied. The macOS has better built-in tools for this; for Windows you need to install PowerToys. But that's just for the OS level adjustments.

Applications are in far worse shape, overall. Most applications don't support shortcut customization! Not even browsers. A remarkable oversight, IMHO. But most apps don't support shortcut customization, forcing you to learn their shortcuts, which is user-hostile no matter how well they are designed, IMHO.

forget coherent, i want consistent.

using a mac for work and a windows machine for personal use messes with me. add in editors having inconsistent emacs keybindings, and some macos apps respecting some subset of emacs keybindings while others don't...and then a kinesis advantage to make some of the solutions non-viable

Is there any hope of handing off keyboard shortcut customisation and recognition to the user agent instead of each web app having to reinvent them? In my ideal world it would be a requested permission (so web pages wouldn’t be able to prevent normal shortcut behaviour by default) and at some initialisation step the website would hint at the things it would like to be able to do (eg purposes, similar commands, groups, suggested keys) and the browser would figure out some reasonable mappings and offer customisability. Browsers could even offer search for web app commands (like eg Mac apps when searching from the help menu).

But web apps might not like potentially giving up so much control over their interface/UX and I think the system would need to be so complicated (eg look at Emacs with nested keymaps, remapping, multiple active keymaps, transient keymaps, and even the weird translation maps) that it would be often overkill and frequently incomprehensible and practically unconfigurable.

But the status quo where web apps often have fixed keyboard shortcuts, override browser/os defaults to do totally unrelated operations, and offer little recourse also doesn’t seem great. All I really want is for Google docs on Linux to give me Emacs (or at least macOS) style shortcuts for moving in text.

Hands down the best implementation of shortcuts I've come across is Blender (the 3d modeller). First it has shortcuts for many actions out of the box and second you can create or modify any keyboard shortcuts on (almost) any operator (button) in the interface by right clicking on the operator and assigning your shortcuts. There is also a fully searchable and customisable key map, you can import and export key maps and you can switch between them easily. Lastly it supports search based navigation.

Coherent and consistent keyboard shortcuts can be incredibly helpful. We spent a ton of time on the choices for GitAlias https://github.com/gitalias/gitalias

I fully agree with the article saying "your users might not even agree on what constitutes a typical workflow". And it's painful to cut shortcuts that people like for their workflows, but that don't cohere well, or can't be consistent.

As a long time Windows user who switched to a Mac at work at one point, I was pleasantly surprised by the extent to which I was able to make the Mac conform to my muscle memory. If I remember correctly, I basically swapped the software mapping command and control. On top of this, I had to finagle with a system shortcut or two. In the end, everything just worked as if it was a Windows machine.

Concerning Emacs, I've found that a combination of QMK and AHK allow me to make everything work more or less like Emacs. Ultimately I think I might be lucky to have a decent memory for this sort of thing, but I've found that I can use the keyboard for everything everywhere.

The first step of consistency is determining and agreeing on what you want the computer to do. I don't see this happening, and it kind of removes the point of having multiple DEs, etc, for experimentation. Though perhaps after investigating in this direction, one might understand how users want to interact with the system key bindings, if at all, and be able to break down user interaction into digestible chunks.

Everyone has heard (or... most people) about a lot of the clever Apple shortcuts, but they are intensely not discoverable. People still need to go out of their way to learn them. It's just it's Apple, so no one cares.

Even on Windows alone some shortcuts are terribly inconsistent.

Redo (Ctrl-Y or Ctrl-Shift-Z)

Replace (Ctrl-H, Ctrl-R or Ctrl-Shift-F)

Save As (F12 or Ctrl-Alt-S)

"Move current paragraph up" is inconsistent even between Microsoft's own programs: Alt-Shift-Up in Word, Alt-Up in VS Code and Visual Studio. Notepad++ adds to the pain with Ctrl-Shift-Up.

Ctrl-F doesn't open a Find dialog box in Outlook, I could go on.

One reason I’ve developed such a dependency on mousing and not short cuts. Now it’s just windows and macos but before it was windows, macos, unity, and gnome 3. Using the mouse is sane. 2-4 sets of shortcuts is not.

Some of it is https://xkcd.com/927/ all over. EMACS is so old that it couldn't use an existing standard because it predates them. Then CUA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access) tried to set a standard but not everyone used it and it fell out of favor, and MacOS did its own thing, and we eventually got to a place where nobody has enough pull to set a standard so it's just a question of what convention(s) a given program decides to support (or not).

Edit: Which is the big reason why I believe that every program should allow users to customize shortcuts completely and ideally ship with presets that do their best to conform to every standard/convention possible ("do you want to preload CUA, EMACS, or MacOS convention shortcuts?").

For macOS-Windows consistency, you can try kinto.sh, although the AutoHotkey-based implementation is not always reliable in my experience.