Add 10 new Hot Keys to the Identify page

Also an agreeing genus-level id, maybe ctrl-g

I think having keyboard shortcuts for these things would be great, but something I experience occasionally with programs that have lots of keyboard shortcuts is random things like new tabs opening when I am haphazardly typing. With identifying on iNaturalist I find myself agreeing with identifications when I am actually trying to type a comment when loading is slow, as you described. So I feel like having more simple letter shortcuts would lead to more hidden accidental mistakes.

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Me too. Like the annotation keyboard shortcuts, I think the Data Quality Assessment ones, if added, should only be “active” when that tab is open. (Though I so rarely use that tab that I doubt I’d be able to remember the shortcuts anyway!)

I use it for favorite and wouldn’t want this changed. :star2:

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maybe we could have “w” = Watch (for follow)

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Not that I personally wouldn’t love these extra conveniences. But I have to imagine that there is already a “translation” challenge for non-English users in making some kind of mnemonic sense of the existing shortcuts. Don’t know if they have already been chosen with that in mind, but if they have, any new ones should probably go through the same review.

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@kiwifergus, your use case just happened to me (the “a” was a third character in the ID I wanted to add (poales), but became “Agree”, so I’d also propose:
p = Purge / Delete my ID from this observation, and open typein for a new ID.

@jdmore, perhaps those letters can be tied to the user’s “Locale” setting, so that they get their own that make mnemonic sense. these would only be on the web interface, and I think you can get that programatically from the browser(?)

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I agree with @bouteloua that any DQA keyboard shortcuts should only work when the DQA tab is open, like annotations are now. Without having a visual representation of the DQA in front of you, you wouldn’t know whether what you purposely pressed is recorded, or whether or not you accidentally pressed a key and recorded something you did not want to record.

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I did not know about the hotkeys. Thanks!

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(Replying here because I jumped the gun and asked for my thread to be closed too soon.)

Last night I was able to scroll comments and previous IDs with the up/down arrow keys in the ID modal:

This was exciting and I was happy about it, but today it no longer works (on two different computers, using Chrome). It also doesn’t work in a place where I actually miss the arrow keys a lot more often, the compare tool:

I admit that I didn’t check the compare tool last night.

So would it be possible to reopen the request thread, and/or making the arrow keys work again?

Would you be OK if it was mapped to another key?

If it’s changed I’ll prob just use my mouse/trackpad to fav instead.

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I fav things so rarely it isn’t worth the hotkey. And if you fav that much it all gets buried on the fav page anyway right?

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Since it doesn’t appear to have been suggested for any other function, I’ll just go on the record that adding “s” for Save would be very convenient. Only active if/when the actual Save button is active.

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Could be problematic: if typing in any field and focus drifts to elsewhere in the page, any ‘S’ would prematurely save the observation etc. This happens with other shortcuts, notably c and a, and can be detrimental to workflow to have to undo the effects of. Even worse if not realised that it has happened.

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Good point for sure. Would you then suggest eliminating the c and a shortcuts?

No, but I have raised it as a concern earlier in this thread and it has been experienced by others. I wouldn’t want to lose shortcut functionality, and I know a lot of users do rely on them, but I also see strange ID situations where I think the stray ‘a’ in particular has occurred. I’m not sure what the best solution would be for the existing problem, and I’m just pointing out here that we would be adding to that problem if we added an S for save.

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Ctrl/Cmd + Enter is the norm for saving: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/save-submit-with-cmd-enter/4093

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Thanks, that thread had flown under my radar. Not yet implemented though, right? Probably a better compromise than a single easily mis-typed letter key, as @kiwifergus noted.

Not as far as I can tell in testing it!

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No, but it’s something we’ve discussed. I’d be OK with D, U, Y, N, and maybe V for starters and seeing how that goes. I’m worried that having so many keyboard shortcuts will introduce more errors, so I think adding a few at first would be a good idea. We were thinking the Data Quality Assessment ones would open up that tab if you pressed them, so you’d know if your keystroke got recorded.

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