Left/Right Arrows Not Mapped to Back/Forward Navigation

[jonathansampson]

Alt+❮ and Alt+❯ should map to the back and forward browser buttons, respectively.

[bbondy]

Smaller than and greater than symbols?
I tried alt + those on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox but they have no effect.

[jonathansampson]

Sorry, those are the left and right arrows, which advance forward or backward in your session history.

Go to google.com
Go to bing.com
Press alt+left-arrow
You are now back on Google.com

May be different in OSX. Cmd, rather than alt, maybe.

[bbondy]

I think that was fixed here?
8ac6ff7
Although with control/command

[mcdemarco]

Re 8ac6ff7, overloading the navigation with hidden shortcuts is not a fix on a mac; now there is no way for the user to disable the extra command-left-arrow and command-right-arrow shortcuts for back and forward because the menu is still using the (standard, btw) command-[ and command-] shortcuts for them.

I noticed this because I already have the command-arrows mapped to Spaces, so now when I change to the previous desktop Brave also mysteriously navigates back one page.

[jonathansampson]

@bbondy It does appear that control-left-arrow and control-right-arrow do perform the back/forward navigation. This is not the case with any other browser on Windows, to my knowledge. So there may be a muscle-memory/discoverability issue for Windows users of Brave Software.

[bbondy]

oh I see I was on OSX where it's command+left, but I guess maybe this particular shortcut has special handling. Thanks. Yes we want to match what people already know for keyboard shortcuts.

[mcdemarco]

I'd also like to note that this issue (of adding alt-arrow key navigation) is not an OSX issue and behavior on the mac should not be changed, even though there is an alt key available. Mapping the alt-arrow sequences as requested could cause problems similar to the one I described above, although there would be fewer actual complaints because it's not a popular system-wide shortcut sequence. In general the relationship between shortcuts and app menu items should be one-to-one on the mac so that they can be remapped by the user (in System Preferences under Keyboard).

[diracdeltas]

So is the issue in the title resolved in 8ac6ff7?

It sounds like there are also separate issues of local shortcuts like 8ac6ff7:

1. not respecting user-specified system shortcuts
2. not being what people expect on Windows

while i like the idea of having a 1-to-1 mapping from actual shortcuts to the app menu shortcuts, i think we are going to get a lot of feature requests for non-standard shortcuts that are commonly in use.

[c-johnson]

I was going to open an issue about cmd+ and cmd+ being tied to back/forward. I use them often in text boxes to mean "go to beginning / end of line", and it's frequent enough that it's very annoying to use Brave with my current workflow. Maybe I'm a weirdo, though. Normalizing shortcut / cmd preferences across operating systems sounds like some people are going to be displeased no matter what.

Update: I should clarify, the issue is that while text boxes are focused, cmd -> and cmd <- should navigate to beginning / ending of line. I peeked around for how I might patch this, but it looks like electron:webview probably handles this, which I'm not sure how to navigate :p

[mcdemarco]

The issue in the title does not appear to be resolved, since it asked for an alt-arrow mapping on Windows that still does not exist; the change added ctrl/cmd-arrows instead.

[DamianStanger]

I use windows 10 and can confirm that alt+left / right does not work. This is standard behaviour for all windows based browsers. Muscle memory is a hard one to change.

[bbondy]

This is implemented here:
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/pull/949/files

It's not released in a build yet but will be in this week's release 0.8.