Keyboard navigation issues on non-US keyboard layouts

Andriamanitra · Jun 19, 2022

Some of the keyboard shortcuts are inaccessible on non-US keyboard layouts. For example on German and Nordic keyboard layouts it is impossible to perform "Shift + ~" keyboard shortcut to open control center. Because Kagi also overrides tab key behavior by default, this means users that are unable to use a pointing device are left with no way to access settings (which would be required in order to disable keyboard shortcuts). I think it would be better to not restrict which elements are accessible through tab key, since that is the standard way to navigate through keyboard. You could still focus the first result by default so it wouldn't affect current behavior much, just make it possible to get to elements outside the results too.

The keyboard shortcut for focusing the search bar ("/") is also rather inconvenient (Shift+7, which requires two hands to type) on this layout, so it would be nice to be able to rebind it.

Vlad · Jun 24, 2022

Andriamanitra

I think it would be better to not restrict which elements are accessible through tab key, since that is the standard way to navigate through keyboard.

Agreed we are already working on it.

so it would be nice to be able to rebind it.

Creating an interface to rebind few shortcuts is a massive undertaking. Perhaps you can suggest better shortcuts that will be compatible with more keyboard layouts?

Andriamanitra · Jun 24, 2022

Letters a–z are a safe bet. Period and comma should also be available on any layout.

My suggestion would be to add 'g' as an alternative to '/' since on qwerty keyboards it's close to hjkl that are already used for navigation. For opening the control center 'c' seems to still be available.

Vlad · Jun 25, 2022

Andriamanitra

My suggestion would be to add 'g' as an alternative to '/' since on qwerty keyboards it's close to hjkl that are already used for navigation. For opening the control center 'c' seems to still be available.

Ok we can add these as additional triggers

Hhulda · 5 Feb

Vlad

Hello,

The option to type "c" to open the control center is not documented in https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html, I only learned about it by reading this thread.

Also, typing "?" on an Azerty keyboard does not make the keyboard help appear, the combinations that I assumed would work actually didn't.
Lastly, [ and ] work, but are not very practical on an Azerty keyboard.

I guess that in an ideal world, Kagi would automatically detect the keyboard layout, set the shortcuts to the keys that correspond to the original shortcuts but mapped to the same places as the current layout, and render the documentation accordingly, with an option to customize the shortcuts from the settings?

In this less than ideal world, ctrl+p and ctrl+n might be good alternatives to [ and ], and making the '?' shortcut work as intended on Azerty keyboards work would be great?

[edit] no, ctrl+n and ctrl+p are awful choices, as they are already taken for "open new window" and "print". Damn, choosing keyboard shortcuts is hard.