Usability - left/right arrow keys navigating topics is not great

[alaricljs]

Problem:
Just started working through the examples. Switching back and forth through browser tabs of documentation and back to the 'book' means I'm not necessarily remembering or aware of the in-browser keyboard focus it isn't indicated well. I go to move the cursor around in the code editor box only to find out that wasn't where keyboard focus was by seeing topics fly by. This also means all my edits are gone.

Fix?:
Personally I wouldn't expect to navigate the book as tho it were a slideshow due to the interactive content. This leads to my first suggestion which is to just don't have those key bindings. On the other hand I'm typing this into github which has a well indicated keyboard focus dialog surround in an obvious color. This contrasts strongly to the tiny input cursor grey-out/highlight depending on focus within the 'book'

I'm no UX guy, so expect it's up to 'you' and/or some discussion to decide whether and how to address this.

Thanks!

[socksy]

I’ve just tried to follow the tutorial on my iPad and have had to give up for exactly this reason. The problem for me is that the indication of whether I’m in the text box is very minimal (slightly greyed out carat vs dark carat?), then you press ◀ or ▶ and it changes and you lose everything. I can see this being a good default in normal, non-interactive docs but it’s quite frustrating to lose all your work so easily.

There’s a few things that could fix this:

• as @alaricljs mentioned, disable these buttons — it’s unexpected behaviour I think, and if anyone’s following the book as intended they’ll be editing the text blocks and so not using the keyboard to navigate between pages
• provide some kind of option to disable this
• get pages to remember your last inputted state — it wouldn’t be nearly so bad to go back and forth if the state is remembered
• support vim keybindings so I don’t even have to use the arrow keys (😉)