Keyboard Shortcut to reply

[hardeepasrani]

It'll be great to have a quick shortcode to jump straight to the textarea to reply, when you've read the entire convo or when the message is small so you just wanna move to replying without touching your mouse.

var bbPressReply = document.getElementById( 'bbp_reply_content' );

jQuery( document ).on( 'keydown', function ( e ) {
	if ( e.keyCode === 82 ) {
		if ( document.activeElement.nodeName !== 'INPUT' ) { 
			bbPressReply.focus();     
		}
	}
});

I wrote the above JavaScript, not sure if it's the best practice, but seems like a good start. Wanted to submit a patch but can't find any JS files where I could add it in the Fourm's meta.

Quick preview: When you press the key r it takes you straight to the textarea.

Any thoughts?

[mindmantra]

We discussed this ticket in yesterday's design ticket triage. As in its current state there is no UI for which a feedback can be given.

Though following are some UX concerns.

How user would be made aware of such shortcut is also needs to be considered. May be a message can be added somewhere to highlight the new shortcut?

Another concern would be about accidental key-press by an uninformed user. It may actually degrade UX. We can do an opt-in when said key is pressed first time. May be show a toast message like "Press 'r' again to enable it as shortcut for quick reply."

[Clorith]

There's currently no flow for this, as mentioned, I'm also vary of having a singular key press do this, as it's easy to hit it by accident in various scenarios.

I would propose that it be a key-combination as a minimum (Keep in mind that some combinations with the r key are used to reload the page and optionally reload the page and clear the cache.

Given that there's no good way to educate users, and there are no other keyboard shortcuts on the forums, I'm leaning towards closing this as a wontfix for now, and possibly returning to this if there's ever a need for shortcuts in general for various tasks.

[dd32]

I'm tending to agree with @Clorith here, since there's no other keyboard shortcuts here and this is super-specific I'm not actually sure it's beneficial to most/all users.

I think this might make sense to be added to a generic "Moderators power tools" type Greasemonkey script for the time being and possibly brought in in the future like as proposed in #2552.