Checkvist was always a not-quite-easy to start with tool, mostly due to its focus on work with the keyboard.
We’d like to change this image a bit. Not that we’re going to remove keyboard shortcuts and replace them with shiny buttons. Quite an opposite - we’d like to help with discovering Checkvist actions.
Welcome a universal keyboard helper Shift+Shift. It allows searching for the relevant actions in the different contexts, be it navigating or editing, for list operations or list item actions, on Due page or on Search results.
If you’re familiar with JetBrains IDE tools, you already know what I am talking about
Actions like aa and la have been reworked. We tried hard to make the migration seamless.
Sounds pretty interesting. Beta makes an excellent first impression.
Noticed:
lala immediately closes the popup
la opens at the top; both shiftshift and aa without a selection opens at a different location but show the same context as la (at least that’s what it looks like to me)
I wished that is was immediately apparent – at the moment the popup opens – what context I am in (list? task?); before reading the actions’ names, which of course let me guess the context (which is important, e. g., for wipe and reset)
speaking of wipe: when on a task, I am asked what to wipe; in list context, after shiftshift, it wipes right away (was to fast for me, when typing into a text box, I expected to have to press enter; lucky there is an undo)
Good points about the need to indicate the context. We’ll try to find a good solution for that. Currently, when several items are selected, we show the number of items in the popup. Maybe we should do the same when only one item is selected?
Talking about wipe issue - this is a bug! Thanks for spotting it - the enter should definitely be expected there. We will fix it. Just in case, besides undo, you had rd for the rescue. But you know that
We definitely owe you a beer and hope will be able to do that in person.
Context 1: Maybe the “1 item” approach is it. I can’t say yet.
Context 2: I guess it would be nice to change from item-context to list-context (to get a different list of actions).
Observations: I made a sticky selection, then double-shift. In the popup, the delete action was much closer to the top (which is nice for my use, but the action list was much different, so I also wondered). I selected delete, and the items were deleted as expected. Afterward, the sshift popup was missing the actions. It looked like this:
Another comment: RESET … it’s distracting that there is a popup asking for “current branch” or “whole list.” My mental model is the other way round: I select the context, then the operation. (And in the popup, it needs a tab to focus the button. Pressing enter should suffice.)
I don’t know if there’s a feasible solution: but when I use CheckVist on a Chrome tablet (the increasingly-popular Lenovo Duet), keyboard commands do not work (even if I force the keyboard to pop up using the Accessibility options, it does not transmit to CheckVist except when I’m in a text box.)
I get around this a good deal by tapping on the Hints sidebar. I was hoping that the new Shift-Shift command on the Hints sidebar would allow me to access other commands, but it brings up the help menu rather than the true Shift-Shift search box.
First, we’ve deployed a new version of the popup. It indicates the context (number of selected items) at the bottom of the popup, including the case when one item is selected.
Actually, if you start searching for a command, it will appear in the search results regardless of the current context. I.e. you can use list-wide actions when you have a selection and called the popup with aa shortcut. We just tried to place most relevant items (from our view) at the top of the list.
I.e. it is more for discoverability of the actions, for actual execution you can use filter to type any.
Would you need it given that action filter finds list actions as well?
Good point, thanks! Will add one-enter submit.
We tried to fight the situation when there could be different contexts like “focused item”, “selected item”, “whole list”. The current solution maybe a bit verbose but more clear.
The dialog itself is excellent. (Even works with left/right and up/down arrow keys.)
But … let me describe what it did:
When an item is selected, RESET shows the scope-selection dialog – where it would be safe (w.r.t. to me choosing the wrong scope) just to reset the item (because it’s the smaller scope). And when sshift-RESET, I have to type ENTER two times. (In my use cases, I almost never want to reset the whole list. And never ever when I have an item selected. So why the dialog + two times enter?)
When in list-scope (i. e., nothing is selected), RESET immediately resets the whole list and then switches to item-scope by going back to the most recently selected item; except when there was nothing to reset, then it remains in list-scope.
All in all, it doesn’t feel natural to me. But it might be my use case and my old habits standing in the way. (And I am inconsistent, because I said “scope” where I used “context” before…)
Update: I used it a couple of times. RESET on an item is ok. Maybe RESET in list-scope should just behave the same way with the branch-option grayed out? (And it shouldn’t change the selection.)
With up/down/left/right, I can go “beyond the options” (the radio button selection disappears; this was in Firefox).
The main reason for introducing the confirmation dialog for reset/wipe was the presence of “Focus” mode for the list. When the list is focused and there is a selection, there are 3 options for the scope, list, focused item, selected item. We tried to rework actions to make them more universal if they are called from different contexts/sshift dialog.
If we show the scope selection dialog in the list/no-selection mode, it would look really weird. As it will work as “Are you sure?” dialog.
I’ll take a look at the unexpected selection change after reset and keyboard navigation in FF.
A short note about the sshift shortcut: If I long-press the shift key and then let go, the dialog opens. I can’t say if something on my machine (Firefox, Chrome) is causing this or it’s the defined behavior. For me, the popup shouldn’t open in such a case.
Yes: Keep Shift pressed, like “hold while thinking,” then decide not to press another key and release it. Checkvist made me realize that I do this when taking notes during virtual meetings. The same thing does not trigger a dialog in IDEA.
