ESC key to navigate up in the hierarchy, tab to navigate between siblings, enter to descend

#1

Similarly to Sketch, especially because Subform is a design tool that depends a lot on hierarchy, I think it would make sense to wire the ESC key to take you up the hierarchy by selecting the parent layer when pressed.

It has become a very important part of my workflow, together with the tab and enter keys, which allow you to move across the entire hierarchy without touching your mouse.

Currently, the enter key is wired to creating a new layer. I suppose that this is a temporary measure, so once the enter key frees up again I'd strongly suggest you consider this approach.

#2

You can already move across the entire hierarchy with just the keyboard.

I’m inclined to think Sketch’s solution is more efficient—Everything requires just one hand. But Subform’s navigation seems to make more sense because the arrows kinda map to how the selection moves in the tree.

I definitely think esc should work like you described. It’s much more convenient for when I’m editing a property on the right and want to immediately edit a property of its parent. It would also make it much easier to select and edit a parent whose child takes up most of its space

I haven’t needed to use esc to deselect anything and I don’t see how deselect is useful. Maybe I’m missing something.

#3

I didn't know about those shortcuts. I do however agree that ESC, tab and enter allow you for the most part to keep one hand on your mouse, which in a design tool is important.

I would be interested to see some discussion on the topic of ergonomics and keyboard shortcuts to improve the workflow speed. They can definitely be a boon to productivity.

Would it make sense to consider swapping the enter key in the "esc, tab, enter" trio for something closer to the left hand, used by the majority of the people, such as space (or cmd/ctrl-space, still ergonomic, if space is already taken for panning)?

#4

Shift reverses the behavior of tab. So maybe shift + esc to descend?

Tab and shift tab mirror behavior found on the web. Esc mirrors behavior found in lots of other apps. I can’t think of anything on the left side that that feels natural, so maybe something needs to be made up.

Cmd space is spotlight and ctrl space seems to be for bringing the selected artboard to the center of the view.

Esc, tab, and enter work on keydown. Cmd would have to work on keyup or else shortcuts involving command would not work. Having shortcuts that work on keyup seem unideal.

Btw, do you think b to insert a box and t to insert text would be better that the current behavior (enter for box and double-click for text)?

#5

Good point about cmd-space. I think I'd either vote for your suggestion, or consider shift-space, which I don't think is mapped, as an alternative. I guess shift-esc may be better.

For boxes and text, I'd suggest R (instead of B) and T. Primarily because of muscle memory from tools like Sketch and Adobe XD. I wish pressing R and T would let you point your cursor where you want to place the layers, but I understand that Subform has a different philosophy about this which doesn't match this expectation.