Feature Request: Carriage Return Opens Book

[10538]

I use Calibre a lot and recommend it to my students regularly. However, one feature I find lacking is the ability to open a book by just hitting carriage return (Enter). I might have just edited the details in the library window, and the book would be currently selected, but I find I always have to mouse over to the line and double-click. <CR> or <Enter> really should do this is well.

William

[theducks]

Originally Posted by 10538

I use Calibre a lot and recommend it to my students regularly. However, one feature I find lacking is the ability to open a book by just hitting carriage return (Enter). I might have just edited the details in the library window, and the book would be currently selected, but I find I always have to mouse over to the line and double-click. <CR> or <Enter> really should do this is well.

William

Enter is problematic. (It always bites me when entering metadata, where one might expect it to move to the next field, like in a spreadsheet, but accepts, and closes the MDE session.


Calibre offers 'V' as the shortcut to View

[kovidgoyal]

The shortcut for view book is V

And you can change it in Prefrences->Keyboard

Although I recommend against using enter, as it is used in text entry fields.

[10538]

Thanks for the replies. If you think of the library display as a folder, then users move up and down the list (using the arrow keys) and would press Enter to open. That's certainly the model on Windows and MacOS. I don't use GUIs on Linux enough to know if it's the same there, but I suspect it is.

The only confusion come in Calibre when a field is open for edit. So Enter should only open an book when it otherwise would have no effect. Currently, when I move up and down the library books with the arrow keys and press Enter, nothing happens.

William

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by 10538

Currently, when I move up and down the library books with the arrow keys and press Enter, nothing happens.

The creator of calibre has provided you with the shortcut key to open books for viewing. He also recommends you don't change the shortcut key to Enter, but if you want to give it a try no one is stopping you.

[10538]

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply but you're missing the point.

ALL users (not just me) bring their previous experience to a new app. They cannot guess or even easily find out that 'V' is the key they need to open an item. The spreadsheet model is of no use to them here because there is no concept of opening a spreadsheet row. The closest thing is the folder model, where 'Enter' is used.

What is likely to happen in most cases is that users will have to re-'home' as its called in interaction design. This is the act of having to move between input devices. In this case, between the keyboard and the mouse. This is a relatively time-consuming operation in Keystroke-Level Model terms.

So it would benefit many users if the 'view' operation was something they are familiar with rather than a relatively arbitrary letter on the keyboard.

(For anyone interested you can find the Keystroke Level Model in Wikipedia and courses on interaction design at http://interaction-design.org)

[kovidgoyal]

Huh? There is a big fat button labelled View. There is no need to guess what key you need to press to view books.

[10538]

I wasn't going to open that can of worms, but since you mention it, almost everywhere else in the user interface world 'view' means to change the layout of the current window. So I would have little confidence in users finding it in the first place. This isn't just a theoretical concern - I have many years experience of testing with users and they just aren't as curious and explorative as most interface designers would like. They just want to get their thing done.

So they fall back to stuff that worked for them elsewhere. Like Enter or Carriage Return to open something in a list.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by 10538

So they fall back to stuff that worked for them elsewhere. Like Enter or Carriage Return to open something in a list.

It is more likely that hitting enter is "do the default action". In a dialog, that is press the "OK" button, and on a list, it is usually "open the selected item" and, again usually, means the same thing as double-clicking on that item. I have always found it strange that calibre has not done something that has been accepted standard all the time I have been using GUIs and for a lot of text-based apps.

[kovidgoyal]

Before being able to hit enter to view a book, the user would first have to figure out how to add a book. And there is no standard keyboard shortcut for that. I'm afraid I find the argument that users that first figure out how to click the Add Book button, then cannot figure out how to click the View button, unconvincing.

Indeed, I find the entire line of argument that users cannot figure out the most basic of things unconvincing. Users of that stripe are highly unlikely to have figured out how to download and install calibre in the first place. And even if they did, they are likely to get lost as soon as they need to do anything beyong viewing a book.

What I am sympathetic to is an argument around conventions. If it is conventional to so something, it can be annoying if your convention does not work in a new context. It does not, however, mean you cannot figure out how to do the action. So https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...37d56325b8d686

[kovidgoyal]

And I should note that the change will only stay in if I can figure out how to prevent pressing the enter key from messing with the rest of the UI, for instance when editing cells in the book list or using the search bar, etc.

[chaley]

Just to be the devil's advocate: why should ENTER start the viewer instead of opening Edit Metadata? After all, I am looking at a line of metadata and I can reasonably expect ENTER to open the detailed view.

[kovidgoyal]

@chaley: you are welcome to submit a tweak to control it, along the lines of the doubleclick tweak.

[theducks]

Gah! Worms

Other than 'do the default action', I don't know of many consistent uses of enter in the wonderful world of Windows UI

Libre office Calc allows me to set 'enter' to be next Column or Down 1 row

'Tab', is almost as bad. TAB-Order for switching fields
In Calibre you set the series name, then you must Tab 2 times because the Tab-order includes the delete series button (please don't change. I now have 6 years of motor memory )

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

@chaley: you are welcome to submit a tweak to control it, along the lines of the doubleclick tweak.

I will think about it, but TBH I will probably simply delete the new shortcut. I don't want RETURN to do anything on the book list if not editing a cell.

As for "standards": my experience is that RETURN does different things in different places. For example, in excel it advances a row. In acrobat it advances a page. In some applications it opens a "details" view. In zillions of applications it "pushes" the default button. It is only in a file manager that it opens the underlying file. I don't see why a file manager's behavior should trump (for example) excel's, given that the user is seeing a spreadsheet of metadata. Opening the book would be close to the last thing I expect ENTER to do.