We are looking at revamping our keyboard shortcuts. We want people to be able to fully use GTDNext on their desktop without ever having to pick up a mouse.
What keyboard shortcuts would you like to see us add?
What keyboard shortcuts do you use the most that we should keep?
What keyboard shortcuts are useless to you that we should remove?
What is your preferred way of activating keyboard shortcuts? (must work in a browser)
Thanks for your feedback!
The shortcut I’ve missed the most is to quickly being able to edit tags. For example shortcut to jump to the tag field and type there.
Also selecting tags ought to be simpler so that I don’t have to type the whole tag always.
Thanks for the feedback.
Regarding selecting tags. Have you tried using the down arrow and hitting Enter? That is a much faster way to select. For example, when I type the letter “P”. I get 3 tags that show. “Phone” “comPuter” and “Paul”. If I just hit the down arrow until I get to “Phone” and press enter I didn’t have to type out the word Phone at all.
I still think we could do an even better job with tags, but you shouldn’t have to type out the whole tag at all. Give that a try and let me know what you think.
YESSS!! This is the area of functionality I have been waiting for.
A) Hotkeys for Tags
There are many great and many terrible things about your competitor MLO (Windows). One of the best things about MLO is how it allows the user to configure their own hotkeys to toggle their tags on and of.
I have set up about 10 tags with various keyboard shortcuts all involving Alt+Shift.
e.g. Alt+Shift+E adds my tag “@Errands” to my currently selected task. Hit it again and it removes it.
e.g. Alt+Shift+U adds my tag “@fUn” to my currently selected task.
As we all know hotkeys are vastly faster than mouse actions. 
B) Keystrokes
This is a subtle point, but even if you insist in typing tags into GTDNext, GTDNext is still using one more keystroke than is necessary.
e.g. Suppose I want to enter the tag “@PC”. I should be able to do this by going to the Tags field and type “@” then “P” and then Enter.
i.e. GTDNext should automatically go down to the first whole tag that matches what you have already typed in.
Whereas GTDNext demands that we go “@” then “P” then Down Arrow before hitting Enter.
And if you do go “@”, “P” [Enterkey] then GTDNext plays dumb and will create a stupid new Tag callsed “@P” that I don’t want!
But how, I hear you ask, do you enter the tag “@P” if you want to. The answer is that you go ahead and enter “@PC” as a tag, but make the tag itself click so that when the user clicks on it, the user can to edit it. And if this happens a new tag is created at this point. [Again, see how MLO does it!]
Cheers
J
A. Right-Clicking
Answering a different question and not highest priority, but I notice that other web apps do have a right-click menu, which could be moderately useful. e.g. If we had a right-click menu this could be used to right-click on a row’s Area name to change it (by choising from a dropdown list) and maybe right click on a row’s filter name to change it (again by choosing from a dropdown list)
B. Another way to apply Areas & Tags?
Also if you have clicked the triangle to get the list of Areas and Tags visible, how’sabout if the user selects a row user and then clicks shift [or control or both?!] maybe the user could instantly add whatever you click on to that task.
e.g. Shift+Control+ clicking on my tag “@PC” would instantly apply that tag the current task
e.g. Shift+Control+ clicking on “Work” would instantly apply that Area to the current task.
This action should probably toggle.
C. Btw it’s a shame we still don’t have the ability to do multi-row selections (but I can see that coding that could be a major upheaval, so presumably not worth doing just now.)
D. Shortcuts to move tasks
I love action performed by the Control+Shift+Up-Arrow (and Down-Arrow). I suggest that you bring Right and Left arrows into play too, such that Control+Shift+Right arrow causes indent and Control+Shift+Left-Arrow causes outdent.
In order to make GTDNext dead easy to learn for newbies, there may be an argument for standardising in line with other applications. If so I can only add that MLO uses Shift+Alt+arrow and MindManager uses Control+Alt+arrow instead of Control+Shift+arrow, but I don’t now if Alt is allowed by browsers.
Cheers
J
EDIT: Wait, WorkFlowy which is web-based, also uses Shift+Alt+arrow, so I suggest GTDNext permits Shift+Alt+arrow (possibly as well as Control+Shift+Arrow so as not to annoy existing users??)
PS.
I am quite rusty on GTDNext. Does this link still contain the full list of keyboard shortcuts?
https://shortcutworld.com/en/GTDNext.com/win/all
Do you mean instead of Tab and shift Tab? Or in addition to?
That looks pretty accurate. Although the notes editor has it’s own set of shortcuts that are not covered in that list, but can be found here.
Yes, we are aware of this nuance. It’s on our someday/maybe list to enhance.
It’s an interesting idea. One we will think about. I think more difficult to pull off in a SAAS app than downloadable software, but still worth considering.
Thanks for your reply. Yes, I’m aware of this but selecting the right tag is still too much of a hassle (especially comparing to priorities). ship69 has already outlined pretty much the same thoughts as mine.
GTDNext is excellent in that I can add/delete/structure tasks/projects so quickly, but I can’t get an equally quick workflow in terms of processing as that always requires a combination of mouse and keyboard to set the tag (that will be used for every task as context or other).
Good question. I am going to be radical and suggest that GTDNext starts having more than one way of doin the same thing - certainly for all the basics of navigation.
This is may seem radical, but for basic navigation I would fuse as many of the obvious keystrokes of other application’s hotkeys as possible, particularly those of your competitors.
I’m not sure who your main direct competitors really are but MsWord, WorkFlowy, MindManager, MLO, Scapple are applications that GTDNext users may already be familiar with.
So I am going to suggest that for many functions, GTDNext has the following MULTIPLE hotkeys for the same function. This will help you steal their users by lowering their learning curves. :^)
TO CREATE A NEW LINE:
MOVE CURRENT LINE UP (by 1 row)
MOVE CURRENT LINE DOWN (by 1 row)
TO INDENT THE CURRENT LINE:
TO OUTDENT THE CURRENT LINE:
TO CREATE AN PRE-INDENTED LINE:
TO MOVE CURRENT LINE TO THE BOTTOM OF CURRENT LIST - (v useful!)
TO MOVE CURRENT LINE TO THE TOP OF CURRENT LIST
COLLAPSE CHILDREN OF CURRENT ROW (if children are expanded)
EXPAND CHILDREN OF CURRENT ROW (if children are collapsed)
GO DOWN A ROW (if children are already expanded)
COLLAPSING/EXPAND THE TREE BELOW CURRENT TASK, (ideally this should be layer by layer)
OK I’m out of time, but you get the general idea. I would imagine that coding more than one keyboard hotkey to do the exact same function is extremely easy. It may feel like a waste of hotkeys (which is would be) but far, FAR more important is that it would make GTDNext dead easy for passing newbies to pick up.
J
Yes, exactly! Which is why James’s stated intention at the top of this thread that “We want people to be able to fully use GTDNext on their desktop without ever having to pick up a mouse.” is such a brilliant initiative.
The only proviso I would add is, like I said in my previous post, to watch out for steep learning curves and for this reason to borrow lots of hotkeys that users may already be using from any similar applications that have a reasonable following. Particularly the hotkeys that one is likely to use all the time for basic movement and navigation.
I would like to have more shortcuts for the notes area. I almost never have the application on full screen and I don’t see all the buttons.
For example all the lists.
Any news about keyboard shortcuts for tags?
Being able to go mouse free when processing still isn’t possible (though much can be done without it). How about for examle Tab+T to put the input-focus in the tag-field.?
One absolute cornerstone of the GTD method is giving all actions a Context. If you don’t add a Context to each action, the whole Context system starts to break down. However as things stand this is rather slow and clunky.
For this reason, what would make a HUGE difference to me personally would be to allow users to configure their own hotkeys for applying different Context tags to the currently selected task. Ideally this should of course toggle the relevent hotkey on/off.
e.g. The user might configure say Control+Alt+E to apply my context “@Errands”
And say Control+Alt+C to apply my context “@Calls”
If there was just one type of hotkey that you added next to GTDNext, this would be what I would want!
Cheers
J