Add essential keyboard shortcuts & navigation

Honestly, I don’t think that this issue will ever be solved. I also can’t really understand it: a lot of large companies and organizations are required to have at least basic accessibility features. But there will always be more active / upvoted feature requests than this so it doesn’t seem likely that Bitwarden itself is going to ever work on this.

To make matters worse: Since the desktop and browser extensions got merged into a single issue (and other smaller requests get merged in here as well) this feature request has just been bloated to the point where it’s just too large to tackle.

I am still hopeful that at some point the desktop client will become usable, but it seems unlikely by now. In the mean time I just keep using KeepassXC since a usable desktop application is so much more important to me than any of the other fancy features.

Request

  • When the browser extension is open and showing the matching site vault entries, allow to navigate them using the up- and down-arrow keys.

Benefit / why?

  • This would allow easy keyboard-only selection when a domain or site has multiple entries.

How does this work in practice?
Assume your site/domain has a few matching vault entries, e.g. 9 or so (not uncommon for internal domains, or different accounts for testing in development, …)

  1. The user goes to the login page of the site
  2. The user presses existing shortcut CTRL-Y.
    This opens (and expands) the Bitwarden browser extension, showing all matching entries. The cursor is by default in the search field
  3. (optional) The user types something in the search field to filter the displayed entries.
  4. The user presses down-arrow a number of times to go to the matching entry
    → this step is the actual requested feature to add
  5. The user presses Enter to select and auto-fill the login fields on the website.

What’s the current alternative?

Press CTRL+L an unpredictable number of times, untill the entry you’re looking for shows up.
or
Press CTRL-Y to open extension, and press TAB many, many times to go to the relevent entry.

Releated feature requests?

There are currently two PRs for this in Githhub.

Keyboard up/down arrow navigation by respawned86 · Pull Request #1962 · bitwarden/clients · GitHub is an old one and was closed without being merged in.

[PM-3363] Implement keyboard arrow navigation for the browser extension & other hotkeys by quexten · Pull Request #5995 · bitwarden/clients · GitHub is a newer one which is currently in Draft status. I would really like to see this one merged in as this is a huge headache for me as well.

2 Likes

I use the Edge browser plugin a lot. One thing I don’t like about it is the way the keyboard shortcuts are implemented. I can open the BW plugin window by pressing control+Q (I forgot if this is a BW setting). But then I have to press Tab a number of times to get to the first entry BW shows. And then another four times to get to a second entry. It would be nice if that could be limited to just one Tab push per entry.

Bump … shouldn’t be very difficult to add shortcuts?

The most important one to me would be “Edit selected item” in the desktop app(s).

1 Like

It would be nice to have a site launch shortcut key in the desktop app (Linux particularly). The other actions to log into a site (copy username and password) already have shortcut keys and thus, this is the only thing missing for full shortcut operation, to open and log into a site.

for me shortcuts in desktop app are a must to conveniently use it. Especially:

  • easy navigation through items with arrows
  • activating “search” when any letter is pressed
  • shortcut for copying password

What I noticed most immediately starting to use Bitwarden for the first time was the lack of a shortcut for “Edit”.

Thank you for the continued work on this.

I really needed this shortcut created, and just discovered that it is now supported.

With the release of version 2024.1 and allowing for multiple profiles within the same instance of Bitwarden; It would be greatly appreciated if there was a shortcut key to quickly switch between two profiles rather than navigating with a mouse.

Not sure about a suggested key combination.