Trigger / Expression Editor keyboard friendliness

Product Suggestions
1

Hello,

I am trying to learn to program trigger logic without needing to click and move the mouse so much, but it’s rather difficult. I see that it’s clearly possible to an extent, but there is a lot of unintuitive tabbing and fumbling required to even try.

I would be very pleased to see the trigger editor flow smoothly using the keyboard only.
I currently can’t automatically select the next field when the previous one is filled in. When I find the right option from the drop down and press enter or tab, the next field is red and unselected. The number of times I need to press tab after that seems to vary. It’s not consistent. Some cases, like for table record options, I can start typing a record placeholder name or table field, and it will actually select the first one that matches the first letter and then unfocus, so I can’t keep typing but I also can’t enter the next field.

In general, being able to start typing variable names and then tab to autocomplete with the highlighted match, would be an incredible feature for both trigger editor and expression editor.

For now, I will keep using the mouse because the randomness of using the keyboard makes it take longer. However, if I could use the keyboard as I describe, I would be able to work many times faster.

2

Don’t forget to vote for your own suggestion :wink:

4

Aha! Thank you. I didn’t realize it’s not like reddit

5

Hey @enewton , thanks for the detail here. Keyboard navigation matters to us, including for accessibility, so the inconsistent tabbing and focus you’re describing is good to have written down. A fuller keyboard-driven flow, like typing to autocomplete across fields, isn’t something we’re planning right now. The closest thing we’re looking at is better search in the expression editor, so you can type part of a name and find it without the full path (see UX improvements to expression editor). This is something we will look to tackle, and when changes come I’ll be sure to let you know here.