A lot of things are much simpler in VisualEditor, but a lot of stuff is harder to do or simply does not work. It doesn't matter if things look shiny if people use a lot more time doing the same task. One area is editing from the keyboard, how can we do all the same things at least equally fast - not just that we can do them?

We insert a lot of top-notices (article marks), and edit them, but how can we do it fast? Yes we can add top-notices as templates, but they are hardly fast to add that way.

We link and delink articles, but how can we do it fast?

On 13 mrt. 2016, at 20:36, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: Ideally, this should some day be real metadata and not templates. Using templates for this is a hack that keeps living long after it should have died. And it should be easy and fast to edit this metadata, no matter if the editor prefers VE or wiki syntax. This is a far-fetched ideal, but that's a how it should be.

On 2016-03-13 19:49, John Erling Blad wrote: At least speaking for the OOjs UI library (on top of which VisualEditor's interface is built), I can assure you that a lot of effort goes into making all actions available from keyboard only, and making our interfaces at least no worse than the "native" ones. I think the VisualEditor team shares these principles. There are some things which take more key presses (you just have fewer "degrees of freedom" when instead of arbitrarily many buttons, you have a finite set of keyboard keys, especially after you exclude keys ordinarily used for typing text), and things which are slightly different than native ones (for example, dropdown lists are different in every OS and every browser, and we try not to do anything browser-specific, so our dropdowns are probably different yet). But we try our best. We insert a lot of top-notices (article marks), and edit them, but how can This is supposed to be doable from the keyboard: 1. Type '{{' to open template insert dialog 2. Type the template name (the right field should be focused), confirm with Enter 3. Press Tab a few times until focus moves to the 'Insert' button, confirm with Enter ...but, something is definitely not right at the last step. I just tried and the focus moved through a few invisible buttons first; filed this as T129791 [1]. Another improvement would be to be able to confirm the dialog with Ctrl+Enter from any field, David actually implemented this recently [2] and it should reach Wikipedias next week. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T129791 [2] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/274984/ We link and delink articles, but how can we do it fast? To remove a link from some text, select it and press Ctrl+\ (that's the backslash) or Ctrl+M. (This also removes any other formatting, like bold or italic.) To add or edit a link, press Ctrl+K with the text selected. You can just confirm with Enter, or edit it and confirm them. By the way, there's a list of all available keyboard shortcuts built into VisualEditor – it's under the '?' button on the toolbar, or under the Ctrl+? shortcut :) -- Bartosz Dziewoński _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Thank you for the pointer to the shortcuts-page. Tried some of them, they didn't work... I'l try to remember to write a bug tomorrow. Selected text, tried Control-M, bolding did not go away. Backslash is not an easy character to reach on Norwegian keyboards, it is way off on some of them. Control-M is more manageable.