Comments on: Want to see something cool?

Want to see something cool?

mathowie — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:24:24 -0800

Want to see something cool? Hit the . key on any mefi front page or comment page. Hit the , key to go up a post/comment. And don't worry, once you click into a textarea or input, it turns itself off (we couldn't ever lose the . could we?). Thanks to the hard work of delfuego for making this happen.

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:35:43 -0800

Trip report: doesn't work in Maxthon (essentially an IE-renderer wrapper, which I use at work), after the first keypress.

Upside: works in Firefox, which I just fired up, on same machine.

Final score: a win for the delfuego team.

By: brain_drain

brain_drain — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:36:15 -0800

Whoa. /keanu

By: mathowie

mathowie — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:37:29 -0800

jason said it'd work in IE/FF/Safari.

By: littleme

littleme — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:37:35 -0800

Slight buglet: on Safari (2.0.3), this disables command-. to cancel loading of a page -- specifically, that key combination just moves me down to the next post. And once I've hit . or , the page looks like it's permanently loading -- the 'loading' animation on the tab keeps spinning and resists all attempts to stop it. Command-. doesn't work, as noted above, and clicking on the 'stop loading' icon has no effect.

By: Dipsomaniac

Dipsomaniac — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:38:57 -0800

When I try it in Firefox 1.5.0.2, it just finds the first '.' on the page (find as you type kicking in). I just went to a comments page and then pressed . Was that right?

By: Dipsomaniac

Dipsomaniac — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:43:08 -0800

Update to say that it works fine in IE 6 on the same machine so it's a Firefox thing. Could be an extension conflict. I turned off Adblock but that didn't fix it.

By: eyeballkid

eyeballkid — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:49:18 -0800

"Find as you type" kills it for me in FF (works fine once I turned it off). I use the quick find so often, I just cant turn it off.

Guess it's all scroll wheel action for me.

By: cortex

cortex — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:51:09 -0800

what's the . mean?

By: Afroblanco

Afroblanco — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:00:04 -0800

Thank you, Matt. If you were here, I'd buy you a cupcake.

By: loquacious

loquacious — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:00:34 -0800

That kicks so much ass it's like some kind of electrified ass-kicking machine.

But what eyeballkid said. I had to turn off the "find as you type" widget.

By: delfuego

delfuego — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:01:00 -0800

Yeah, find-as-you-type will override *any* keypress handlers, so there's really nothing to do about that... sorry.

By: delfuego

delfuego — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:05:09 -0800

Oh, and as for Safari getting stuck in the page-loading mode, I am seeing that behavior no matter how I reduce the Javascript functions that handle the page moves. I'm digging into it.

As for the Command-. shortcut override, I should be able to handle that.

By: furtive

furtive — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:11:27 -0800

j and k would have been more intuitive.

By: jenovus

jenovus — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:12:41 -0800

Ehhh, kind of neat but it breaks the "Back" button functionality. I'll stick with scrolling so I can keep using my thumb-buttons.

By: amro

amro — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:13:39 -0800

This is awesome. Works for me in IE.

By: Dasein

Dasein — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:19:03 -0800

I agree with jenovus - neat, except losing the back button is a real pain. Is there any way to change that?

By: soundofsuburbia

soundofsuburbia — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:21:56 -0800

Very cool, but what jenvous said about the back button. Still, I'm sure I'll find this function very useful in long threads.

On preview: Aw shoot, I thought we'd be able to link to comments like this from now on. :)

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:37:02 -0800

If you want to do this in Firefox without disabling find as you type, type an exclamation mark. F3 will take you down the page.

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:39:02 -0800

(Shift F3 takes you back up)

By: barnacles

barnacles — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:51:01 -0800

As a non-user of the back button (nothing but new tabs for me!): Nice. Thanks.

By: Manhasset

Manhasset — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:51:59 -0800

Works for me in Safari. Thanks, delfuego.

By: Dipsomaniac

Dipsomaniac — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:02:55 -0800

Just as another add-on, if you go to Firefox options and turn off 'Begin finding when you begin typing' (under 'Advanced') you can still press '/' to invoke find as you type and the '.' and ',' work. Good work, delfuego.

That's how you change it in 1.5.0.2, anyway. Previous versions were different, as I recall.

By: Dipsomaniac

Dipsomaniac — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:04:23 -0800

Dammit. Except that the ',' doesn't work, but the '.' does. ',' tries to go to #entry-25 every time.

By: Dipsomaniac

Dipsomaniac — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:05:15 -0800

Except that time, apparently. There's a weird intermittent bug there, because it's working again.

By: quonsar

quonsar — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:10:48 -0800

solutions without problems: it's what we do best.

By: delfuego

delfuego — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:29:29 -0800

I'll look into using a method of scrolling the page that doesn't involve changing the hash of the URL -- which is what breaks the back button.

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:30:32 -0800

Sure, this completely changes the meaning of '. ' posts. Now they mean "there's nothing to see here, move to the next comment"!

By: cellphone

cellphone — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:53:26 -0800

Just as another add-on, if you go to Firefox options and turn off 'Begin finding when you begin typing' (under 'Advanced') you can still press '/'

Hey, that's no browser! That's a MAN page

By: delfuego

delfuego — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 20:13:54 -0800

There y'all go -- if you force a reload (or empty your cache and reload), you'll get the new version of the scripts that do the magic. The reliance on the URL hash is gone (read: your back button will work), the weird Safari constant-loading behavior is gone, and only pressing one of the shortcut keys WITHOUT a modifier will work (so CMD-. is now back to working fine).

By: Dipsomaniac

Dipsomaniac — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 20:21:44 -0800

Wow. Delfuego's good. Works for me in Firefox as long as I enable using '/' to use find as you type.

By: CunningLinguist

CunningLinguist — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 20:58:32 -0800

Way cool!

By: aaronetc

aaronetc — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 21:26:05 -0800

Awesome -- doesn't seem to work on Projects, though.

By: littleme

littleme — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 21:43:50 -0800

Fantastic -- many thanks for the Safari fixes.

By: Eideteker

Eideteker — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 21:50:05 -0800

Can we have a customizable option using keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard for those who set their preferences to "Left-handed"? While we're replacing the Page Down key, and all.

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:27:53 -0800

Next: a keybind to "Keep" a message. This appends it to the end of the list of new messages, such that "Kept" messages are redisplayed just before the input box. A great aide to recognizing that an issue has been adequately resolved, hence no need to comment after all; and makes it easier to pullquote when one does need to address another user.

And here is a wild idea: automated summarization of messages, with link to original. What would that do to our communication style? Would it make things even worse around here, dropping us to an [insert Slashdot here] level of craptitude? Or would we all become rich and famous raconteurs?

sorry, jack, ain't go no pepsi blue 4 u.

By: Galvatron

Galvatron — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 23:04:27 -0800

Very cool. But j and k are really the only sensible keystrokes to use here. Anything else is heresy.

By: jenovus

jenovus — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 23:09:03 -0800

Excellent! Thanks for fixing the URL hash despite my immediate griping, delfuego.

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 23:52:49 -0800

Works now in Maxthon, for some reason. Cool beans.

By: lenny70

lenny70 — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 01:36:05 -0800

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 01:39:02 -0800

OK, I lied, sort of. It works, but '.' takes you two comments downthread, and ',' takes you two comments up.

Also, I want my javascripty smoothscroll when it jumps to the next comment, by god! (OK, actually, I don't really mind either way, 'cause I'm not a keyboardmonkey like Mr Haughey.)

By: Plutor

Plutor — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 03:02:42 -0800

Ugh. This is just about the only Web 2.0 trend I could do without: keyboard shortcuts. Especially partially-implimented ones. You mean I still need to use my mouse to navigate into a thread? And there's no highlighting indication of the thread I have selected right now? (And you preserved reBlog's poor choice of keys, Matt.)

By: delfuego

delfuego — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 06:14:17 -0800

Because I've just woken up and haven't put my full etiquette suit on, Plutor: if you hate keyboard shortcuts, then what is the point of your complaint? What is different about the site right now than was true yesterday morning, other than the presence a feature that you're not going to use and that is 100% unobtrusive to those not using it?

By: jack_mo

jack_mo — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 06:28:44 -0800

If you want to do this in Firefox without disabling find as you type, type an exclamation mark. F3 will take you down the page.

Unless you're on a Mac, in which case Command+G will take you down the page, Command+Shift+G will take you back up.

Think I'll be invoking find as you type with the forward slash from now on, though - this is well handy. Thanks.

By: jack_mo

jack_mo — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 06:37:30 -0800

Hmmn, it doesn't change the focus (think that's the right term), so when I use the '.' to scroll down the page to an interesting post, I can't hit 'tab' to move to the first link of the post in question, then hit enter to follow it (hitting tab takes me to the first link on the page). Shame.

Dunno if the focus thing could be changed, or even if it's worth it - do many people navigate web pages that way?

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 06:58:27 -0800

How is this different from the spacebar/shift+space combo that already exists?

By: Plutor

Plutor — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 07:57:56 -0800

delfuego: "if you hate keyboard shortcuts, then what is the point of your complaint? What is different about the site right now than was true yesterday morning, other than the presence a feature that you're not going to use and that is 100% unobtrusive to those not using it?"

Nothing at all. I admit that wholeheartedly. I'm like a Windows fanboy complaining about the iMac puck mouse. I don't use it and I don't plan to use it. But I was just pointing out that from a UI point of view this is certainly not a full-assed implementation.

By: cgc373

cgc373 — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 08:40:48 -0800

I hardly ever see anybody use "full-assed" properly anymore. Kudos!

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 09:26:21 -0800

Plutor, I would argue that your idea of a full-assed implementation is a mistake -- it would make an unobtrusive niceity into an obnoxious "yellow-fade" constant flash as I go down the page.

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:34:26 -0800

j and k would have been more intuitive.

No, j and k would have been a fucking stupid hangover from the hideous old days of computing, where wilful obscurity was great. I don't use Gmail's shortcuts for that reason.

AZ for up-down and ,. for left-right on the other hand, now that's intuitive.

(Also doesn't work in Mozilla 1.3 or IE 5.1 that I can see)

By: poppo

poppo — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:38:18 -0800

doesn't work with netscape 4 on BeOS.

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:41:23 -0800

doesn't firefox work on BeOS?

By: delfuego

delfuego — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:41:47 -0800

How about in Mosaic on Windows for Workgroups?

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:46:00 -0800

/gets out his tub

Moz 1.3 and IE 5.1 are the only browsers for OS 9. OS 9, whatever Jobs says, is still v. much alive in publishing and print production houses, against the wishes of the users. So when things don't work on them, they don't work for journalists at all.

(Gmail and Bloglines' keyboard shortcuts work fine in Moz 1.3, btw)

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:49:22 -0800

I've telnetted to port 80, and I keep hitting "." and "," but no dice. We're talking tenths-of-asses over here.

By: davey_darling

davey_darling — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 11:33:41 -0800

Quonsar is to Metafilter as Simon is to American Idol, isn't he?

(and I mean this in a good way)

By: poppo

poppo — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:00:57 -0800

doesn't firefox work on BeOS?

i was just kidding, i will fire my writers

By: delfuego

delfuego — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:10:12 -0800

I'm not sure what the issue is with Mozilla 1.3 -- I'll look into that. I don't have an installed version of IE 5.1, so I'm not too able to look into that one... alas.

I'll also think about extending the reBlog metaphor a bit, and see if it'd be easy to make the enter key load the selected post -- but then, I'll also have to add visual notification of which post is currently the selected one, and I'll be overriding the use of enter to follow a currently-tab-selected link, so I'll really have to think about it a bit.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:19:33 -0800

J & K would be nice additions though...

By: kindall

kindall — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:21:29 -0800

J and K are two of my favorite letters.

By: delfuego

delfuego — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:45:22 -0800

bonaldi, is Mozilla 1.3 really available for OS 9? Looking at the Mozilla old release page, Mozilla 1.2.1 seems to be the last version available for OS 9. I don't want to put a lot of debugging into 1.3 (on OS X, mind you) just to find out that it's 1.2.1 that's the problem....

By: kindall

kindall — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:58:55 -0800

WamCom Mozilla 1.3.1 for Mac OS 9

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 14:04:43 -0800

I'm using the one kindall linked to, yep. And thank *god* for that wee chappy's efforts.

By: sequential

sequential — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 22:45:30 -0800

So none of you have arrow keys?

(Don't get me wrong, I think mousing is the devils work, but keyboard short cuts that duplicate the default behavior of blatantly more obvious keys doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. Not to mention spacebar/shift-spacebar, as mentioned above.)

By: sequential

sequential — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 23:14:16 -0800

Sorry for the double, I hit post instead of preview.

No, j and k would have been a fucking stupid hangover from the hideous old days of computing, where wilful obscurity was great. I don't use Gmail's shortcuts for that reason.

First, there are modern games and other non-obscure applications that use 'j' and 'k' by default. Second, 'j' and 'k' were used in absense of arrow keys. Sure, it's a bad UI in modern contexts, but many people are familiar with this key layout that have never touched a VT100. (I prefer a VT220.)

AZ for up-down and ,. for left-right on the other hand, now that's intuitive.

You find it intuitive to use two hands to move left, right, up, and down? You prefer your primary means of navigation to be keys that your fingers don't naturally rest on when you're not typing? That's just wierd. I've played games with this configuration, but it's too much hand movement to actually use the keyboard to type and to play.

The reason the 'a' and 'z' keys are poor choices is because the natural fall of fingers on a QWERTY keyboard means that you use your weakest finger to make the primary movement of the page. In this respect, 'j' and 'k' are better choices than 'a' and 'z' or even arrow keys.

By: sequential

sequential — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 23:19:43 -0800

I lied. The VT100 had arrow keys.

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 05:05:54 -0800

You find it intuitive to ... That's just wierd.
I was taking the piss. Yeh, I'm used to using those because early games used them, just as some apps used j-k. But the contrast was supposed to show that nobody can claim they are intuitive, because they aren't.

They're so counter-intuitive (vertical motion put on a horizontal) that I still can't remember which is up and which down, like those hideous arrow-keys in a row that some old Macs had.

And yeh, the VTs had arrow keys. Add the software not using them to the pile of things-that-are-shit-about-Unix-that-geeks-will-defend-to-the-/bin/dth

By: matteo

matteo — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 10:56:22 -0800

holy fuck! cool!

By: matteo

matteo — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 10:56:39 -0800

thanks matt and delfuego!

By: matteo

matteo — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 10:57:20 -0800

I'll keep senselessly playing with it until I get carpal tunnel syndrome!

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 11:38:44 -0800

doesn't work at the command prompt in PC-DOS 1.0

By: metaculpa

metaculpa — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 12:50:35 -0800

It seems to skip the best answer in Askme? At least, it does for me here.

By: delfuego

delfuego — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 13:45:18 -0800

Metaculpa, you're right -- it does! How weird. It looks like the DOM parsing I'm doing assumed that each CSS class was attributed independently. I'll fix that.

By: delfuego

delfuego — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 13:47:14 -0800

There you go. You might have to force a reload, but it's fixed.

By: nowonmai

nowonmai — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 15:55:54 -0800

This so-called 'feature' has broken the rest of the Interwebs.

By: kindall

kindall — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 18:15:12 -0800

They're so counter-intuitive (vertical motion put on a horizontal)

:)

By: ericost

ericost — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 19:42:24 -0800

delfuego said: and see if it'd be easy to make the enter key load the selected post -- but then, I'll also have to add visual notification of which post is currently the selected one, and I'll be overriding the use of enter to follow a currently-tab-selected link, so I'll really have to think about it a bit.

I say: Why not just do a focus() on the relevant link for the item that the , or . selects? Then we can just hit enter to load it, same as we would if we had tabbed to the link.

By: delfuego

delfuego — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 06:56:48 -0800

Eric, that's not a bad idea -- but it might be a bit weird to move the post to the top of the page (with the . key) and then have the thread's permalink selected automatically, meaning that to go to any other link in the thread you'd have to work backwards with shift-tab. I dunno... I'd have to think that through.

That being said, moving the focus somewhere into the top-of-the-page post seems logical, since it would fix jack_mo's issue and keep the logic of the page intact. Let me think on this one...

By: NewBornHippy

NewBornHippy — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 01:16:21 -0800

Nice. How about a more VI-ish j and k. Or a more Emacs-ish n and p

By: NewBornHippy

NewBornHippy — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 01:17:04 -0800

Also: no auto-repeat?

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 05:18:23 -0800

NewBornHippy is exactly the sort of poster described here.

By: NewBornHippy

NewBornHippy — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 05:43:28 -0800

bonaldi does automatic gender categorization based on people's reply. That's interesting but hardly new. Some tend to jump to hastly conclusions based on cursory reading of people's comments and contributions.

By: cortex

cortex — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 07:45:17 -0800

bonaldi made a gender categorization?

By: todbot

todbot — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 10:39:05 -0800

wait, why not just use SPACE and SHIFT+SPACE to to do the same thing?

By: delfuego

delfuego — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 15:53:06 -0800

In order:

NewBornHippy, bonaldi is referring to the fact that the exact issue you ask about has been discussed in this very thread, but rather than read that, you just posted your bit and moved on. Also, re: auto-repeat: it's a function of the fact that the keyboard shortcuts rely on the Javascript "onkeydown" event, which doesn't fire repeatedly; the next version of it (running on my own site right now) relies on "onkeypress", which does repeat, and which will solve the issue.

todbot, space and shift-space move page-by-page, not comment by comment. It's like asking why there are page-down and page-up buttons when there are already arrow buttons on the keyboard -- it's because they serve different purposes.

By: NewBornHippy

NewBornHippy — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 17:44:16 -0800

> bonaldi made a gender categorization?

RTFL.

By: cortex

cortex — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 21:54:12 -0800

So you fixated on the (ancillary and qualified) male emphasis as being the thrust of bonaldi's comparison, and missed entirely the applicable substance of his reference?

You'll note, upon a careful re-R of TFL, that the phrase is "Especially if any of those readers are male." Especially, rather than only.

You'll also note, upon a careful R of TFT, that bonaldi's point was, however snarky, apt: your comment was already made upthread, and your gave no sign of having read it. That you missed both that and bonaldi's point does not speak well to the defensibility of your position.

By: jewzilla

jewzilla — Mon, 01 May 2006 19:23:38 -0800

95.38% of metafilter readers use vi. It should be j and k.

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 01 May 2006 23:57:36 -0800

Fuck j and k. vi is vi; vi is not metafilter. Nethack on a keypad is sublime, and things should be measured by Nethack.

By: melt away

melt away — Wed, 03 May 2006 05:54:37 -0800

I have to say that j and k are actually quite intuitive. They are located where my fingers already are. No moving, stretching or looking required.

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Wed, 03 May 2006 06:36:42 -0800

great. so which one should be up and which one should be down, then?

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 03 May 2006 07:52:14 -0800

Just remember this easy mneumonic, bonaldi:

"John goes Jup and Kate goes Kown."

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 03 May 2006 07:53:03 -0800

oh no wait it's "Kate goes Kup and John goes Jown." Hope this helps!

By: hackly_fracture

hackly_fracture — Sun, 07 May 2006 16:15:01 -0800

All hail the space bar, yo. Usability's perfect---big and stupid.

By: Mitrovarr

Mitrovarr — Wed, 10 May 2006 20:36:27 -0800

If I was going to choose keys for this, I'd have used the w and s; very familiar to any gamer. If there's any kind of left/right functionality, there's a and d (maybe highlight next link and highlight previous link with enter or space selecting.)

Alternately, numpad_2 and numpad_8 wouldn't be bad, but that would suck for laptops.