Bring Back Idiomatic Design

Re:Bring Back Idiomatic Design by glerk on Sunday April 12, 2026 @09:25PM (#47746461)

One trend that I can’t stand currently is the obsession with keyboard shortcuts everywhere even to the point of overriding browser defaults. Cmd+F focusing on the site’s search input instead of letting me search in the page with the browser’s search functionality (looking at you github and Linear).

I generally don’t need any fancy keyboard shortcuts on a website. I have a mouse, I can just click around.

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Re:Bring Back Idiomatic Design by nine_k on Sunday April 12, 2026 @09:48PM (#47746604)

To the opposite, I'm a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts everywhere they exist. OTOH taking over the browser shortcuts, and especially the search, is something that I very much dislike.

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Re:Bring Back Idiomatic Design by glerk on Sunday April 12, 2026 @10:40PM (#47746951)

I'm ok with them as long as they're not overriding what I have saved in my muscle memory (cmd+F for search, tab to change the focused element, cmd+L to go to the navbar, and a few others).

I think the user should be able to customize/disable those as much as possible if you do provide them.

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Re:Bring Back Idiomatic Design by eviks on Monday April 13, 2026 @01:00AM (#47747785)

What do you think about search override on some dysfunctional modern forums that can't display more than 3 replies, so if you used the built in browser search you wouldn't be able to find anything in a discussion?

But also, Vivaldi is awesome here is allowing you to block overrides for specific shortcuts so you Ctrl F is always yours

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Re:Bring Back Idiomatic Design by glerk on Monday April 13, 2026 @01:54AM (#47748109)

> dysfunctional modern forums that can't display more than 3 replies,

I assume that's overzealous virtualization/infinite scroll pagination? I don't have a solution, I think fundamentally we're building a workaround for a workaround and the root cause for the performance issues should be fixed. Somehow, HN is able to show a lot of comments per page and page loads are always O(100ms). I'm wondering what kind of sorcery they're using to achieve this.

But if you have to deal with this in your codebase, my instinct is still not to hijack the native Cmd+F, even if it only searches what's inside your viewport. You can expose some other command for full custom search (Cmd+K seems to be the standard, I think VSCode made that popular).

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Re:Bring Back Idiomatic Design by bryankaplan on Sunday April 26, 2026 @07:07AM (#47909331)

Ctrl-k focuses the Search bar unless a website hijacks it, which became regrettably common after the Search bar got hidden by default. But Firefox allows one to reënable it, and some of us continue to rely upon it.

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