To-Do List Shortcuts

Release notes

Problem to solve

People are needing both to navigate through items in the to-do list quickly, and to take actions on items within it, including responding to threaded comments and marking something as "done".

Intended users

User experience goal

To introduce ways for people to efficiently triage items on the to-do list, and to support people who want to take these actions in different ways, for example, keyboard users.

WIP Proposal

As part of introducing to-do/notification previews, and as per previous discussion, introduce keyboard shortcuts for important actions in the to-do/notification list workflow.

Where we're at, so far:

  • Previous: This shortcut is for moving backward through the to-do/notification preview drawers. Issues already use the forward/backward arrow to navigate between designs so we could follow the same pattern here, which would be a left arrow for previous... ←
  • Next: This shortcut is for moving forward through the to-do/notification preview drawers. Following the pattern for previous, we could use the right arrow for next →.
  • Reply to a comment: This shortcut is for replying to a comment in the preview drawer. Issues use r to start writing a comment. Following that same pattern, using the r shortcut could trigger a reply to a comment displayed in the drawer.
  • Snooze: This shortcut is for snoozing a notification. There are a couple of ideas in play for this one. s is already used for snippets but, maybe we could add cmd/ctrl here, so hitting cmd/cntrl + s would trigger the snooze options. Alternately, we discussed z for snooze. Adding additional zzzs could change the snooze length.
  • Mark as done/archive: This shortcut is for marking a to-do/notification as "done" or "archived" (future). This one's tricky in the sort term because, right now, we're marking the to-do as done but, in future, we'll be archiving notifications. Can we introduce this command in the short-term without having to change the command, in future? If we do want to introduce immediately, not sure if we want to lean on the current or future language here? We could cmd/ctrl + d to mark as done now.
  • Open in new tab: This shortcut is for opening up the related resource (issue/MR/pipeline page) in a new tab from the preview drawer and list views. We could cmd/cntrl + t for "open to-do/notification in a new tab", as that seems to be the general pattern for the "open in new tab" shortcut elsewhere.
  • Undo: This shortcut should perhaps work both when the user is in the preview drawer and when the user is in the list view. We discussed having the option to undo the last action, for instance if someone had accidentally marked something as "done", but we'll probably need to better define which actions it should apply to. Following general pattern, we could cmd/cntrl + z for this shortcut, though that might interfere with plans to use z for snoozing.

Further details

Permissions and Security

Documentation

Availability & Testing

Available Tier

Feature Usage Metrics

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

What is the type of buyer?

Is this a cross-stage feature?

What is the competitive advantage or differentiation for this feature?

Links / references

Edited by Amelia Bauerly