Context: I come from a long background of using and developing for both Windows and macOS systems. I primarily use macOS for all tasks nowadays.
Idea: Allow use of macOS’s native text editing keybindings rather than those defined by the Lucid web app. Restated: allow users to use text editing shortcuts that are indigenous to their system’s native keybindings.
Detail:
One of macOS’s strengths are enabling common methods of interactions even across different applications, whether they be Apple or otherwise. It’s a design paradigm that's baked pretty deeply into the OS and in frameworks used when creating applications. This design is surfaced in all modes of interaction: keyboard, trackpad, mouse, UI, and others.
The focus of this request are text elements and keyboard shortcuts.
For any text element web (input, textarea), provided a web application has not overridden them, I can expect to use emacs-style keybindings to navigate the text within that field. Examples:
- ctrl-a : place cursor at beginning of the line
- ctrl-e : place cursor at end of line
- ctrl-f : move cursor forward
- ctrl-b : move cursor backward
- ctrl-d : delete character in front of cursor
- ctrl-n : next line
- ctrl-p : previous line
These basic ones are very helpful navigating / editing text, no matter what the app. An application need do nothing at all and it would benefit from having these keybindings work by default. That all changes when an application creates new keybindings.
It’s clear that the UI designers at Lucid come or came from a Windows background as they have specifically enabled Windows-style keyboard while editing text:
- ctrl-a : select all
- ctrl-p : print dialog
- ctrl-b : bold
- ctrl-i : italic
- ctrl-u : underline
It seems the Lucid app programmers specifically disabled ones all the ones I typically use, the ones I listed above. I imagine this was to create a common experience across all systems.
Many programs nowadays allow users to select what set of keybindings they prefer using. It could be a user-selectable option.
