Optimize tab-indexes in vault pop-up

I really like using the hotkey to open graphical interface in the browser extension and after that to auto-fill with the keyboard only. The Ctrl+Shift+L hotkey to auto-fill a login without the Bitwarden interface works very well, but I really like having the overview of filtered logins for a given site.

I use a keyboard shortcut to open the browser extension, and after that I cycle through the possible options with the TAB key to auto-fill that website. However, when I ‘tab’ through the list of login options there are a lot of UI elements highlighted. Personally I would be glad if only the possible login options are highlighted, having one tab highlight per login option (and not for every UI-item within the login option).

Proposal

When using TAB (or shift-TAB) to cycle through the login options, only highlight the login options itself. An extra TAB should highlight the next login option, and not the elements to the right within the login option element.
After clicking ENTER the selected login option will be applied to the login box triggering the auto-fill. If the auto-fill was not setup for this site yet the auto-fill will not be applied, but the ‘view item’ UI will be triggered for this login option. This will give the user the option to click ‘auto-fill and save’ or have second thoughts on auto-filling the login option, possibly noticing that they are on a malicious-website.

This will make the short-cut use of Bitwarden more smooth in my opinion. I do understand that this is a ‘breaking change’, and I hope that there is more support for this feature.

Update

It might be a better idea to map the functionality described above to the up-down arrow keys, since these are unused in the browser extension. This would make the feature request a non-breaking change.

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Not to take away from your proposal (which seems reasonable to me), but since your main goal seems to be to efficiently autofill using keyboard maneuvers only, I just want to make sure that you’re aware of the existing Ctrl+Shift+L hotkey for autofilling from the browser extension.

Hi @grb
Thanks for bringing this up. I am indeed aware of the Ctrl+Shift+L hotkey. I think it works well for websites for which I have just a single login saved in Bitwarden, but for use within organizations where multiple logins for a single site may exist I am missing the overview.

Since (compared to the pop-up interface) the list of login options is hidden it is not really clear if you have multiple logins for this site and in which order they will be applied after hitting the hotkey again.
Besides that - a personal preference, I must admit - I like the less invasive way of entering the master password in the vault pop-up itself instead of having a new page opened dedicated to it, which is the default for the Ctrl+Shift+L hotkey.

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Thanks for clarifying your request. One more tip, in response to this comment:

If you weren’t already aware, if your vault is locked or logged out, you can do Ctrl+Shift+Y to type in your master password into the browser extension itself, then hit “Enter” followed by Ctrl+Shift+L to autofill. If you don’t like how the browser extension stays open when you do this, you can toggle it closed/open by using Ctrl+Shift+Y again. Bonus: After typing in your master password, you will be shown the list of all logins matching the current URL (to have the overview you were looking for).

In any case, none of the above is to take away from the gist of your request, which is to have new behaviors for the Tab and Enter keys in the browser extension.

Thank you @grb. I think the hotkey you are referring to does ‘Activate the extension’, according to the documentation. Is that right? If so, then that is what I refer to as being the vault pop-up :D.
I just noticed that in Firefox it is called a ‘vault popup’, but in Chrome it is called ‘activating the extension’ although it does exactly the same thing.

While playing with the extension I found that there is currently nothing mapped to the up-down arrow keys. Maybe using these keys is a better option than remapping the TAB functionality because this would make my feature request a non-breaking change.

I see. I thought you were using the so-called “pop-out”, a browser extension running in a window that has been detached from the main browser window — there is an arrow icon in the top left corner of the browser extension that launches a “pop-out”:

image

 

If you’re not using the pop-out, then I have always seen the standard interface referred to as just the “browser extension”. The term “pop up” I’ve mostly seen in the context of the mobile app, or the autosave prompts in the browser extensions

I’m sorry for the confusion. I tried be as clear as possible by copying the terminology in my browser (Firefox), but it made it worse :sweat_smile:. As you can see below the ‘Activate extension’ is called ‘Open vault popup’ in Firefox.

My feature request is indeed about the browser extension interface itself. What I am looking for is:

  1. Keyboard hotkey opens browser extension with pre-filtered list of login options. (This works)
  2. Efficient TAB’ing or UP-DOWN keying over login options being able to autofill a certain option. (Needs optimization).

I will update the original post to refer more clearly to the extension itself.

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