45

Just a thought, but would Stack Overflow be able to add some keyboard navigation shortcuts? Something along these lines:

Shortcut Key - Page to navigate to:
           H - Home
           Q - Questions
           T - Tags
           U - Users
           B - Badges
           N - Unanswered
           A - Ask Question

Shortcut Key - Action to Perform (While on page with a listing of questions)
           K - Previous Question
           J - Next Question
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3
  • I can hardly see this work. Especially because I'm always annoyed if a website hijacks something (yes, I'm looking at the new edit screen, I want my Escape back). There's also another problem? What key to use for the shortcuts? Ctrl, Alt? Those are already used for menu and other shortcuts which vary with language and browser. F.e. Ctrl + B does open my bookmarks...you don't want to take that away from me on a site-wide scale, right?
    – Time Traveling Bobby
    Commented Aug 11, 2011 at 12:29
  • @Bobby webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/18041/…
    – balpha StaffMod
    Commented Aug 11, 2011 at 14:07
  • 4
    Possible duplicate of Keyboard shortcuts are now integrated into the site
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Commented Dec 3, 2019 at 4:16

3 Answers 3

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17

I'd be in favor of this, as long as you could turn it on or off at your discretion. Maybe it could work as part of a larger "StackOverflow Labs" feature.
Think Gmail Labs... you could turn on or off different "experimental" parts of functionality that other users have written (and there'd probably have to be a submission/verification process).
Come to think of it, that might be a good way to keep a lot of the Greasemonkey scripts that people have written in a central location, and give some of their hard work more visibility to those that don't visit Meta but might have use for them.

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12

The official Stack Exchange keyboard shortcut extension for almost all browsers is here:

Official keyboard shortcuts

Installation instructions at

https://stackapps.com/tags/script/info

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1
  • According to "Patrick Hofman", the first link in this comment redirects to the old app that shouldn't be used any more. Not sure if any replacement link exist, though I'd like to find out ...
    – Pierre.Vriens
    Commented Mar 16, 2015 at 17:00
6

I strongly agree with having Keyboard shortcuts for navigating StackOverflow. Keysets could be made the same as in Google Reader and Gmail with:

  • k previous
  • j next
  • c comment on currently selected question
  • c compose question on home page
  • g,t -> brings up a prompt to enter the tag
  • g,h -> goto home
  • g,m -> goto messages
  • ? brings up a overlay of available keyboard commands.

That would really make navigating SO sooo much easier when not having a mouse with a scrollwheel handy on my laptop.

greetings Daniel

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4
  • The j, k keys would work exactly opposite to what vim does, and vim users are the most likely to want to use those keys to navigate the page. That being said, vim users that want those keys to navigate most likely already assigned them on their own browsers.
    – perbert
    Commented Apr 28, 2010 at 15:22
  • Google uses J for Next, anyway.
    – nickf
    Commented May 7, 2010 at 19:51
  • Yes.. Sorry I got that wrong.. Anyway the idea stays the same.
    – Tigraine
    Commented Jun 1, 2010 at 11:42
  • 1
    +1 for using ? overlay and g,{x} syntax from Google :)
    – BrunoLM
    Commented Nov 8, 2010 at 21:45

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