Keyboard shortcuts for annotating and deleting an annotation

[hengzhe-zhang]

Annotating by mouse and deleting an annotation by mouse need much tedious effort, especially when I need to modify these annotations frequently. Keyboard shortcuts for annotating and deleting an annotation will significantly alleviate these problems. Therefore, is there any possible way to use keyboard shortcuts do these operations? Such as use "Alt+Q" for annotating selected text, and "Alt+E" for deleting the selected annotation.

[robertknight]

Thank-you for the feedback! We don't have much in the way of keyboard shortcuts for annotation tasks at the moment. We've been working on general keyboard accessibility recently so you can use the keyboard to navigate around the sidebar more easily. Providing convenient shortcuts for creating and editing annotations is something I think we should definitely look at. For PDFs we can chose something which we know doesn't conflict with the PDF viewer. For HTML documents I'm not sure what will be best.

If you have any more context about your particular use case, feel free to add it here.

[hengzhe-zhang]

Custom shortcuts are a good way.
By the way, the most use case of this annotation tool to me is to mark up something to read later. For reading technical articles, it is so often to confront confusing sentences. I usually mark up them temporarily and retrospect them later.

[klemay]

Hey @zhenlingcn, we added a keyboard shortcut for annotating selected text last year: when the annotation adder pops up, type a to create an annotation or h to create a highlight. You can also navigate through and select text using your keyboard. More info here

I realize this partially addresses your request, as it doesn't cover modifying and deleting annotations. However, we have an issue that broadly covers keyboard shortcuts, so I am closing this in favor of hypothesis/product-backlog#1202

[tedmiston]

@klemay I came across this issue while searching for a way to activate the Hypothesis browser extension with a keyboard shortcut. I find that I switch to my mouse just to click the extension very very frequently, and think it would be much faster to have a custom shortcut, say ctrl-h to activate it. Do you know if this is possible today?

Update: Scratch that, I just found a doc for this - https://web.hypothes.is/help/how-to-activate-hypothesis-on-a-web-page/.

[klemay]

I’m no longer at Hypothesis but I can tell you this is possible in Chrome! You can set a keyboard shortcut to activate any Chrome extension— Google has documentation for this.

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