Add essential keyboard shortcuts & navigation

Thanks for clarifying, @bunnyhero. I agree that the extension is lacking - it is a harder fix given that BW is a slave to what individual browser developers dictate. Since you did mention the app, I thought perhaps you weren’t aware of all the shortcuts available. Makes sense now. Cheers! :+1:

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@dh024 perhaps you can clarify if you are part of the Bitwarden team or just an active community member? I would really like someone from Bitwarden to address what is (I think) the primary focus of most of the discussion here. Namely, keyboard navigation in the browser extension.

Whether you speak for Bitwarden or not, any reference to how “hard” this is to do is going to fall on deaf ears. Lastpass had this figured out before Bitwarden even existed. Now, 4 years since it was formally requested (LONGER, since it was a Github issue well before this community existed), there’s been no progress.

The truth is, I’m unlikely to switch back to Lastpass or any other service JUST because of this (although some users have!). But I sure will think twice before recommending it to others.

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Nope, I don’t work for Bitwarden. My only affiliation with them is as a customer. I received a lot of great advice from the community forums here when I started using Bitwarden, so I just try to pay it forward by helping out here as another community member.

Regarding the implementation of this feature request, I know it is technically possible. But remember that Bitwarden is still a fledgling product with a tiny development team compared to the big guys like Lastpass or 1Password. There are well over 2000 feature requests on this forum, so I assume the BW devs are prioritizing implementation and new development very carefully. So it is going to take some time to grow and get to everything, unfortunately. Having said that, they seem to be making great progress and are churning out a better and more fully featured product each release at a solid pace, so I am very happy to support them, even if there is a lot of polishing left to do. Cheers! :+1:

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When the original issue was created there were no shortcuts at all in the desktop app (except for the ones handled by the OS). That’s why the github issue and my initial post here both mention some of shortcuts like copy username / password. Just now I learned that many of these have been implemented in the mean time, but you need to read through every single comment here to actually hear about this.

This brings me to a point which I wanted to make back when the browser extension was merged with this issue, but I just couldn’t be bothered because I had almost given up on bitwarden already: This feature is just too large to be fixed. By combining the browser extension and desktop issue into a single one it became nearly “unfixable”, especially given everyone understands something different under it, so whatever is being implemented someone will always think that this is not enough.

Maybe it would be time to split this feature request into smaller chunks which can actually be worked on? The fact the issue about not being able to copy username / password has been fixed by now (Basic keyboard shortcuts - #3) shows this point pretty well…

Also huge thanks @dh024 for linking the keyboard shortcuts. I wasn’t even aware that these shortcuts have been implemented by now, so I never bothered to look at Bitwarden again in the past 4 years.

Sadly it seems like I can’t even edit the original post now, so I can’t even link to the keyboard shortcuts for people who stumble over this feature request…

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Hi @hausi! That is a very good idea to add a note at the beginning of the feature request to mention that the desktop shortcuts are now available and the browser extension still needs some work. I have added this, as well as a link to the desktop shortcuts like you suggested, to the top of the thread. Cheers!

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Hi Trey, just wondering if there’s any update on this?

I’ve been trialling Bitwarden since and think it’s great. The lack of navigation shortcuts is literally the only thing holding me back from getting premium. So would be great to see this soon :slight_smile:

Thanks!

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We want to change Keepass to Bitwarden in our company. I like Ctrl+C for copy password. How often do you use the copy entry in bitwarden?
I would love to see the ability to customize the shortcuts yourself. So I would adapt my Bitwarden client to that of keepass, which makes it easier to switch.

Two years since I’ve checked this thread and still many of the BASIC keyboard shortcuts still not implemented. Not a dig on the developers - but hinders my full migration from 1PW / interest in purchasing premium.

Hard to rationalize not being able to navigate the UI with keyboard shortcuts… Can’t select multiple entries in the desktop app, can’t drag/drop into folders, no CMD+E for editing entries or CMD+S for saving entries. It’s a bit infuriating.

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@dh024 thanks for the update! Is there a GitHub issue to follow for the chrome extension?

The one that feels most missing to me is one for the “Launch” button after searching. Would be great if it was just <enter>

Hi @matschaffer - welcome to the community forums.

No, I am not aware of any GitHub issue related to this, but perhaps someone else is?

I created Keyboard Shortcut for copying notes · Issue #921 · bitwarden/browser · GitHub but the developer closed. This isn’t an exact fit with the request in this topic, but one of the reasons this critical feature (adequate keyboard shortcuts) has been left undeveloped for so many years is because unlike Github issues, forum feature requests are pretty invisible and ineffective in driving development.

"[forum requests have] no link with the actual product development in terms of commits\PRs. Hence there are no real progress updates in this Feature Request. It can be open forever without any status changes and feedback to users. Github issues can go stale after inactivity. Feature requests in a forum do not. Too many GitHub issues that go stale look bad reputationally for the project and encourage regular updates.

IMO, should be both. As now, users should request features in this forum using their language (not always precise enough), then devs\admins create one or more associated GitHub issues with the necessary precision and post links to these in the forum Feature Request. Creation of a GitHub issue shows that the devs do actually give a sh!t and intend to do something about it. Other FOSS projects, work well with this setup.

It’s not enough for project leadership to promise they’ll keep an eye on a forum. Meaningful feedback via GitHub issues is also necessary. They serve different purposes and types of people, but both are needed."

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Hi @bitmatron and thanks for the feedback! Currently we only use Github to track issues, but we do review the forums daily, including the Feature Requests category. There are a LOT of great ideas here, and the public roadmap is the way that we communicate our high level goals for the year.

You’ll see a few of us on here responding directly to feedback. We also just introduced a roadmap:planned tag to the forums that we will start using to flag feature requests that are set to be included in a future release. Keyboard shortcuts and accessibility improvements is definitely on our radar :slight_smile:

@bw-admin Thanks for the info about the current approach to the roadmap and how the team tracks feature requests. I see that keyboard shortcuts are not mentioned at all on the 2022 roadmap which you linked to.

Apologies in advance if what I’m about to write gets a bit ranty, but please rest assured it comes with love from a huge Bitwarden fan and Premium member who only wants the very best success for the project. So this feedback is intended purely as constructive criticism to help the team connect better with community needs.

With respect, and IMHO, saying “Keyboard shortcuts and accessibility improvements is definitely on our radar” seems to miss the mark by quite a wide margin. If the feature’s nowhere to be seen on the roadmap, saying it’s “on our radar” comes across as basically saying “we know people want it, but we have no intention to do anything about it any time soon”. That’s almost worse than not saying anything at all, and certainly worse than just saying “sorry, we know people want it, but we’re not planning to do anything about it because of reasons X, Y, and Z”. In the latter case you could at least add something like “… but if someone submits a PR to improve this, we’ll consider reviewing and maybe merging it, and first take a look at these currently open PRs since they might serve as a good starting point”.

The community has been clamouring for better shortcuts since 2018. That’s FOUR YEARS, during which time I’m afraid the community has been ignored or fobbed off on numerous occasions.

Now, if adding more keyboard shortcuts was some hugely complex and difficult task which required months of development, I would have some sympathy with the delay. I’ve been a professional developer for around 30 years and I know how hard it can be to deliver everything that everyone asks for in a timely fashion.

But we are talking about very simple improvements here. Any decent developer should be able to make substantial progress in this in under a week, quite possibly less. And this is currently one of the top 20 most highly voted feature requests. So isn’t it time, after 4 years of requests, to take this a little more seriously and prioritise it?

If I wasn’t so damn busy at the moment I would offer to work on it myself. But I see that contributors have already made several attempts to improve the status quo, and they’ve all stalled:

So it seems that maybe the environment for contributions could be made a little more conducive to success. And even if a contributor vanishes before the PR gets merged, the team could still take over development and see it through to completion.

Thanks for listening!

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Hey @aspiers, thanks for the thoughtful response and I completely understand! We’re currently hiring for a Product Manager, Platform and Community to improve our processes, just as you suggested, so look forward to that!

In the meantime, I’ll take your feedback to heart and I’ve mentioned in several other threads recently that users can use the Github Contributions area to submit proposals, so I’ll be sure to reference that option whenever possible.

I’ll also review the links you provided with the team, so thanks for sharing. I’m also personally very passionate about accessibility, so I’ll be sure to share any news that the team has to share!

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Thanks for the info above, folks!

This has me wondering if maybe I should run my own chrome extension based off of Keyboard up/down arrow navigation by respawned86 · Pull Request #1962 · bitwarden/browser · GitHub - seems like it’d provide the best starting point to add an “enter” launch shortcut as well.

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Thank you so much @bw-admin for the quick and considerate response, and great to hear you’re hiring for that role - I’m sure it will help a lot when it’s filled! Good to learn about the GitHub Contributions area too - sorry I haven’t had time to pay close enough attention to the various threads to notice that before.

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It would be really cool if you could try both that and Keyboard shortcut to copy password by respawned86 · Pull Request #1961 · bitwarden/browser · GitHub and see how they compare!

Thanks! I tried the up/down today but had to update it first Updated: Keyboard arrow navigation by matschaffer · Pull Request #2492 · bitwarden/browser · GitHub

Both PRs are quite old so definitely some work to be done to bring them up to date.

Also I only got it working once. I suspect this is just something I’m not understanding about the extension refresh workflow though.

Neither answer my personal ask though which is a “launch” hotkey. Up/down will help in the case of multiple hits here though.

Maybe 1Password has warped my brain here but I like that once a site is in my password manager I don’t need to bookmark it anymore. I can just search & launch from the manager.

It’s the thing I miss most having made the switch from 1Password 6 to Bitwarden.

Also incase it helps anyone I discovered these context menus that the extension also adds.

They’re not keyboard-driven of course, but I wish I’d noticed them earlier.

It at least avoids the needs to flip between the keyboard & mouse to get logged in to something. I can just mouse my whole way to an autofill or copy password.

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Figured I should follow up here that the up/down PR as well as my updated version are now closed.

The functionality is seems desirable but the approach in that PR was not (by both me and the maintainer).

So either someone will have to propose an updated PR before we can get that functionality.