Hey, that's my spacebar

04 Apr 2009

If you’re going to give an input field focus by default, you’d better be 100% sure I’m going to be typing before I do anything else on that page. Twitter.com (when you’re logged in) is by far the worst offender of this that I run into on a daily basis, but I’ve seen it happening more and more. Are most people really twittering every time they land there? I would say I scroll 90% of the time, and type 10%.

Maybe the space-to-scroll isn’t the smartest hotkey in the world, but I’m not ready to throw it in the pit with delete-to-go-back just yet. At least with ‘back’ I have another, more appropriate choice (two in the case of Safari, and probably other browsers). And no, page down is not a replacement for space; it’s inconvenient on full keyboards, and even worse on most notebooks. I would suggest command+space or something like that as an always-available backup, but I think it’s safe to say launchers have claimed those as their own.

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