Ability to disable keyboard shortcuts

[brylie]

There are several keyboard shortcuts for everyday tasks on GitHub. Some keyboard shortcuts use single letters like c, t, e, or a a. While the single-letter keyboard shortcuts may be convenient, they interfere with external tools active on the page.

For example, when editing the text suggestions in the Grammarly editor, GitHub will interpret my writing as keyboard shortcuts, often with detrimental results.

It would be helpful to disable GitHub keyboard shortcuts so that they wouldn't interfere with other browser plugins/keyboard input.

[gaknoll]

Hey @brylie - sorry for delay in getting you a response, but came across this while searching for feedback. In the fall our accessibility team shipped a feature that allows you to disable character key keyboard shortcuts. You can disable them in the Accessibility section of your user settings.

[brylie]

Thanks! :-)

That feature was somewhat disruptive. I wasn't using the keyboard shortcuts.

[FlorianFranzen]

Thank you, now please let us disable all the rest too, please.

[jdanbrown]

+1 this doesn't fully resolve the issue, as per the newer comments below

[vphantom]

Unfortunately only a handful of shortcuts can be disabled in Accessibility. For example for me GitHub has started to think that CTRL+G means "jump to line" (even though that should be ALT+G per its own documentation). I only use GitHub to browse code, not to be in a pretend IDE, so it'd be nice to be able to dumb it down considerably.

[omundy]

I am on a Mac and use CTL+G with a custom browser extension to switch between github.com and corresponding github.io sites (to grade student work). I never have used keyboard shortcuts on the site. For some reason CTL is now working as a modifier key for an Apple computer and breaking my tool. Please let me disable all keyboard shortcuts.

[jdanbrown]

I use ctrl+g in Chrome for the Group Tab menu item (using macOS App Shortcuts), and github's keyboard shortcuts prevent this from working on any github.com tab, which is very confusing and annoying.

To hack a workaround, I used tampermonkey and wrote a userscript to disable ctrl+g on github.com pages. Here it is in case it's helpful for others while we wait for the ability to disable all keyboard shortcuts.

• https://www.tampermonkey.net/

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Github: Disable ctrl+g keyboard shortcut (for macos Group Tab shortcut)
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      0.1
// @description  Disable ctrl+g on github.com
// @author       jdanbrown
// @match        https://github.com/*
// @icon         data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(() => {
    'use strict';

    const f = eventName => event => {
        // console.log(`[XXX] ${eventName}`, {event}); // XXX Debug
        if (event.ctrlKey && event.key === 'g') {
            // console.log(`[XXX] ${eventName}: ctrl+g`, {event}); // XXX Debug
            // Yep, either of these prevents github from seeing it
            event.cancelBubble = true;
            event.stopImmediatePropagation();
            // Nope, this one prevents github _and_ macos from seeing it
            //  - ctrl+g configured in: System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts -> Google Chrome
            // event.preventDefault();
        }
    };

    [
        'keydown', // This one works
        // 'keyup', // This one isn't needed
    ].map(eventName => {
        document.addEventListener(
            eventName,
            f(eventName),
            // Must pass useCapture:true else github still sees it
            true, // useCapture
        );
    });

})();

[mpeter50]

The comment marked as an answer is not an answer. The solution suggested there only disables a subset of the keyboard shortcuts, which are regularly in the way.

[andy-from-meiro]

This is ridiculous. I can't use my browser shortcuts on this particular site because the developers have decided to override them? Seriously? I thought I was missing something because it's too bad to be true.

[mpeter50]

Yeah, it seems so.

There may be workarounds to it though, both of which are very hacky. Havent had the time to look into them so far.

---

One of them may be to use a custom userscript to try to unset the shortcuts.
This is just javascript coding, so not much to detail on it.

---

The other way is to use uBlock Origin's filtering engine to interfere with github's way of setting shortcuts.
uBO allows you to make custom filters that are applied to JS function calls instead of network requests. These filters often use things that are called scriptlets.
For example, one can (partially?) disable WebGL with these uBO filters:

*##+js(aopr, WebGLRenderingContext.prototype.getExtension)
*##+js(aopr, WebGLRenderingContext.prototype.getParameter)

And selectively enable them for specific websites:

demo.f4map.com#@#+js(aopr, WebGLRenderingContext.prototype.getExtension)
demo.f4map.com#@#+js(aopr, WebGLRenderingContext.prototype.getParameter)

duckduckgo.com#@#+js(aopr, WebGLRenderingContext.prototype.getExtension)
duckduckgo.com#@#+js(aopr, WebGLRenderingContext.prototype.getParameter)

These above make use of the aopr scriptlet, which is a shorthand for abort-on-property-read.
Some scriptlets also accept parameters.

There are a lot of scriptlets to look through. Maybe there are a few which can be used to prevent setting up certain shortcuts, but I have a feeling that this would be an all-or-nothing, and so it would break the markdown editor's shortcuts too (bold, italic, etc).

Its ridicolous that we need to do this with a content blocker, as if Github's web client would do malicious things, but at least content blockers are to our help.
Obviously uBO will not work in chrome anymore with the Mv3 changes, but only in Firefox.

[mpeter50]

Oh well, just after sending I noticed that the previous response talks about solving this with userscripts.

[vphantom]

Thanks for the hint about uBO scriptlets! I do fun things like inject a CSP header to disable workers on most sites, but I had no idea we could filter/inject JS. This is very promising. (I switched to Brave to keep uBO functional.) I guess I'll just disable all keyboard nonsense from GitHub since it doesn't want to behave reasonably.

[mpeter50]

Thanks for the hint about uBO scriptlets! I do fun things like inject a CSP header to disable workers on most sites, but I had no idea we could filter/inject JS

I'm glad it was helpful! By the way, it is also possible to use custom scriptlets: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-settings#userresourceslocation