[UI enhancements] Keyboard shortcuts, better document traversing, flexible date entry

[GruberViktor]

Problems:

1. When editing lots of new documents, you need to use the mouse quite often, either to go back and select a new document or to hit the save button. (Sure, you could tab through the form, but this starts to get boring too, after some time)
2. Sometimes you just want to go through the documents, but in the zoomed (editing) view, the only way forward is by hitting "Save and edit next".
3. Date entry only accepts a properly formatted date, which can be annoying to type out, or even select in the calendar

Possible Solutions:

1. In Odoo for example, you can hold the Alt key, and you will see an overlay of the possible keyboard shortcuts:
2. Notice the "p" and "n" buttons in the right top corner of the image (meaning previous and next, respectively). With these, you can traverse through the different records, in the order as shown from the previous filtered list. In the case of paperless, that would be documents. Without the overlay you see arrows like so: [ < ] [ > ]
   Also, you could just bind alt+s to save the document, alt+shift+s for save and next, and so on.
3. A feature in odoo that I appreciate a lot, is the possibility to enter dates without punctuation, or with commas instead of dots. I.e. when I enter 080322, the date is automatically changed to 08.03.2022. Same goes for 8,3,22 (great, because the number block on the keyboard has a comma, but not a dot) or even 0803, it will then be assumed that the current year is desired.

I'm not good enough in JS to add these features, but maybe some of you will agree with me that they would be great to have.

[shamoon]

1. Keyboard shortcuts do sound helpful but Im not sure what best practices are around keyboard shortcuts in web apps. Like for example if we really need the alt key, seems most dont (see https://sashika.medium.com/j-k-or-how-to-choose-keyboard-shortcuts-for-web-applications-a7c3b7b408ee )
2. Yes, date stuff needs improvement. Perhaps someday will take another crack at it but its pretty challenging at least in part because of internationalization stuff. Is 080322 August or March? Depends who you ask =) At the moment it just uses the browser date input but implementations of that vary wildly between browsers. See Improve date input jonaswinkler/paperless-ng#177 & Date dropdown clear buttons, keyboard support jonaswinkler/paperless-ng#148 . I still have a little hangover from those but maybe someday will come back around to it. I agree needs improvement.

[bluemangotree]

At least shortcuts for deleting and marking documents (CMD + A or STR + A) should be implemented.

[nerdiges]

Would the global HTML attribute 'accesskey' be an option? (see https://html.com/global/ ?

[jschwalbe]

Would love to see shortcuts enabled. I don't really know anything about anything, but I know how to ask ChatGPT stuff. Seems pretty straightforward to implement shortcuts:

document.addEventListener('keydown', function(event) {
    // Check if the key combination is Control + S
    if (event.ctrlKey && event.key === 's') {
        event.preventDefault(); // Prevent the default browser save action

        // Your custom action goes here
        alert('Control + S pressed! Custom action executed.');
    }
});

Obviously if you wanted to make them customizable, it'd be more work. But seems quite doable.

[thiswillbeyourgithub]

New user of paperless-ngx, I'm absolutely loving it! I do want to mention that I was really expecting some powerful shortcuts to easily do the manual editing of the files. As it is one of the first annoying things to do with paperless for a new user I just wanted to point it out :)

[Sockenschlauch]

I absolutely agree with the previous poster thiswillbeyourgithub. In the newer versions manual editing is a pain in the a**.
It takes 15!!! presses of the tab key to edit the title. It easily adds up to over 40 tab key uses to edit one document in my inbox view and jump to the next. (Version 2.6.3). This is what keeps me from updating from 1.11.3, since the newer features just pale in comparison to the newly introduced pain in the workflow.

In comparison: Version 1.11.3 takes only ~15 taps in total to edit one of my inbox documents and I start with cursor in the title field.

I would happily help the development if I had the skills. At this point I am so frustrated I am even thinking about learning JS just to create a fix for that. (Which I would already have if there weren't any other things to fix/maintain in my life)

[menkej]

I just realized that there seem (almost) no keyboard shortcuts. As a gmail user I hit / to go to the search box and did the same in paperless (with no effect). I second this request.

[thiswillbeyourgithub]

FYI / is almost universal. Vim, github, etc implement it afaik

[menkej]

I know. And there are others, like hjkl and such what I can think of. It makes sense to align with those quasi standards.