Signal-desktop: Shortcut to activate the extension

[alekna]

Chrome allows assigning extension activation shortcut. Could you please add support for it?

[meineerde]

Alt+S is a comparatively poor default for a shortcut. When entering German language on a Mac with an US (or international) keyboard, Alt+S is a key sequence which is used to enter the ß character which is still quite often used in German.

Generally on Macs, the Alt key serves as a modifier to access alternate representations of a character. To issue commands, the correct modifier key would be CMD (which is similar to CTRL on Windows / Linux or (to a lesser degree) the CTRL key on the Mac.

I understand that CMD / CTRL is already quite loaded with commands, CMD+S for Save being the most prominent, making it hard to find a better alternative. Still, at least on MacOS, CTRL+S would be a much better default choice.

[johannes87]

I agree on meineerde's point. I noticed I was no longer able to enter an "ß", which was kind of confusing at first. Especially because it's not straightforward how to disable it.

I'd like to make the proposal not to add a default shortcut at all, and let the user define it if s/he wishes to do so. That way, nobody gets bothered, and users can still use this feature if they want to.

[scottnonnenberg]

Sorry about this. Sadly I don't know how to make this change without stepping on someone in some other locale. Can someone help use find an expert in international keyboards to weigh in and ensure that whatever we switch to from Alt+S doesn't step on someone else? Also, please open a new issue to track this issue.

[halicki]

@meineerde I think that Alt+char to get a different representation of a char is true for many different languages (eg. Polish) and systems (Mac, Linux, Windows). So in my opinion we should stay away from Alt+char or Alt+Shift+char.

[liliakai]

Even if we found a key combo that doesn't map to a special character in some language, it could collide with other extension defaults. Can we keep support for adding a shortcut, but not wire it up to a specific key by default? That way, those who want to use this feature can enable it for whatever works for them.

[mjaniec2013]

Alt-S is bad in Polish too.

There was similar problem with ALT-N in Evernote.

There the solution was to get rid of the shortcut or - on Windows - replace it with Win+Shift+N or something more complex ;)