Feature: Keyboard shortcuts

Links

Issue

Purpose

Allow people to quickly and easily navigate Cockpit without using a mouse.

Audience

This serves two audiences:

Improve accessibility for those who have motor control issues
- not everyone can use a mouse effectively or easily
- anyone can easily injure their wrist or fingers — or perhaps might've cut their mouse clicking finger instead of a carrot while making dinner
Optimize cockpit for administrators who often use their keyboard more than their mouse
- our audience has a higher percentage of people who use command prompts, vim, emacs, and rely on keyboard shortcuts in applications and desktop environments

Challanges

Cross-platform issues (command versus control on Macs)
OS / Desktop / Browser keyboard grabbing (some hotkeys are reserved)

Goals

Familiarity
- try to rely on shortcuts that are similar to desktop applications when possible — sometimes these can be the same exact shortcuts, but other times, due to challenges above, they might have to be only similar
Memorability
- Shortcuts should be tested, feel natural, and easy to remember
Access all of Cockpit via the keyboard in a non-convoluted way
- That is, one shouldn't have to tab around to everything; some parts of Cockpit should have specific hotkeys

Proposed keyboard shortcuts

Alt-Esc: Task killer
???: Navigation
???: Host selector
???: Header bar
???: Top-left menu
???: Sign out

(Please add more here)

Decided-upon keyboard shortcuts

These shortcuts should be tested across supported platforms (OS & Browser) and agreed upon by the team.

...

(There's nothing yet. TBD)

Implementation

Figure out keyboard shortcuts for important parts of Cockpit (not everything will have a shortcut, but it should be possible to get to all parts of Cockpit with the keyboard, often with a shortcut and tabbing around and/or arrow keys)
Common way to register keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcut dialog
- Displays available keyboard shortcuts
- Should have its own shortcut

Item number 1 will have to be repeated several times for different parts of Cockpit, as deemed necessary — especially when new features arise or the UI changes.