Using shortcuts inside browser

[cyalide]

Description

Some VSC shortcuts do not work because they are reserved for browser-specific actions.
For instance, Strg + N usually opens a new file in VSC, but is reserved by various browsers for creating a new tab or window.

Do you have a plan for improving this? Of course every shortcut is accessible by the command palette, and commands which are unaccessible by the default shortcuts can be reconfigured to be accessible by other shortcuts, but this would require everyone who wants to give code-server a try to configure his instance first before being able to use it productively, and having powerful editing capabilities without the need for extensive configuration is one of VS Code's key features.

Related Issues

[kylecarbs]

We’ll be providing some local-apps soon. Unfortunately, we can’t override keybinds like ctrl+n. It’s a browser restriction.

[hbjydev]

Not strictly true. There is a way to do it, but it's kind of a local-app hybrid. If you're on Chrome (sorry Firefox users!) you can go to Menu > More Tools > Create Shortcut... and just tick "Open As Window" when you make it. Then, just use that to work with Coder and all your ctrl+? shortcuts will work.
It is a browser restriction, although there is a code-side workaround to that too. When you listen for each event, you can put event.preventDefault();. That'll stop any default handling from occurring, including the browser trying to process the keybinds iirc.

[cyalide]

When you listen for each event, you can put event.preventDefault();. That'll stop any default handling from occurring, including the browser trying to process the keybinds iirc.
I think it could be very useful to provide such a behaviour as an additional option which could be activated and deactivated using some kind of trigger, for example using the command palette or a specific keybinding.

[hbjydev]

So almost like switching between a capture hotkeys and don't capture hotkeys state?

[cyalide]

@haydennyyy Yes, exactly.

[hbjydev]

@cyalide I dunno, man. This seems like a lot of unnecessary modification to VSCode herself, especially when desktop apps are in the pipeline...

[kylecarbs]

Interesting. We can experiment with this, but the apps are on the way.

[hbjydev]

@kylecarbs https://stackoverflow.com/a/7296303 There's a little brief tutorial on how it could be done.

[kylecarbs]

We already listen for keybindings and override what we can. When opening in a window, if the browser allows for those keys to be overridden they actually should be.

[nhooyr]

Closing as this issue as wontfix, cause we really can't.

Electron app is being tracked at #142

[w0utert]

I know this issue is closed as wontfix and I understand why, but I'm wondering whether it would be possible to have the option to at least remap shortcuts that involve modifiers automatically so they don't conflict with browser keybindings. For example remap all shortcuts involving Ctrl to Ctrl-Alt or Ctrl-Cmd or something like that. This way they would be very unlikely to conflict with any browser shortcuts, which almost exclusively use a single modifier.

I appreciate the sshcode efforts, but for me it's a big plus to be able to access the same running code-server instance from any machine that has Chrome on it, without having to install anything else, synchronize source code and settings, etc.