How to disable Keyboard Shortcuts?

[Goodgame Studios]

Although, I have disabled "Keyboard shortcuts" in the Preferences section of my JIRA User Profile, keyboard shortcuts for "issue action" are still in effect.

Some Ideas?

JIRA v6.3.8

Thank you in advance.

[Matt Tse · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the lively discussion about keyboard shortcuts! My name's Matt and I'm one of the product managers in Jira Cloud. My team picked this problem up and have just started to roll out a feature that will allow users to enable/disable shortcuts at a per-user level.

See the attached screenshot of what this will look like. We were constrained by time so we decided to put it into the keyboard shortcut (Shift + ?) dialog for now. We believe this will address the problem and in the future, we will consider adding it inside the user profile page.

As of this afternoon, it will be available to 5% of Jira Cloud customers and we aim to get this rolled out to 100% in early August. 

Kind regards,

Matt

[Louis Mamakos]

It's not clear if this disables the shortcuts that are a concern to me. 

On macOS systems, I commonly use the normal text-widget keystrokes, like control-A, control-B, control-K, etc. that are emacs-like and deeply ingrained in muscle memory.  Will the work you're doing allow these to work as you'd expect on a mac?

[Matt Tse]

Hi Louis,

I'm not familiar with the macOS keyboard shortcuts you listed and what they do, with respect to Jira that is. Could you elaborate?

The feature we've built disables all of the Jira Cloud shortcuts that appear in that Keyboard shortcuts window/dialog (e.g., Quick search, Create issue, Toggle sidebar, Assign issue, etc)

Cheers,

Matt

[Louis Mamakos]

There are some standard keyboard shortcuts that work in almost all macOS applications.   You can easily try a text field widget, like the URL field in Safari, or just in TextEdit application.

If you type:

• control-A - the cursor is returned to the start of the line
• control-B - moves the cursor back one postion
• control-F - moves the cursor forward one position
• control-N - moves cursor to next line
• control-P - moves cursor to previous line
• control-D - deletes a character at the cursor position
• control-K - "cuts" the characters from the cursor to the end of the line
• control-Y - "yanks"/pastes from the cut buffer back into the text field

..and some other emacs-inspired keystrokes

See "Document Shortcuts" in https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 for some additional exposition

[Matt Tse]

Hi @Louis Mamakos ,

Sorry I didn't get a notification from your reply. I tested the MacOS shortcuts you've listed with the Jira keyboard shortcuts disabled and they work as expected.

Cheers,

Matt

[Jyoti Shankar]

I unchecked the "Enable General Shortcuts" in our Confluence installation. @Matt Tse will this disable all the keyboard shortcuts including Navigation? It doesn't look like the interface you have posted above.

[Matt Tse]

Hi @Jyoti Shankar ,

The changes I've mentioned are only applicable to Jira Cloud.

I've passed your comment along to the Confluence Cloud team. I don't know what their roadmap looks like right now and whether or not this is something they'll be working on. If I learn anything new, I'll be sure to provide a reply here.

Cheers,

Matt

[Marla Parker]

THANK YOU!  Several of us were going crazy with unintended consequences of typing at a window thinking we were typing into search but the search box not "listening" so instead a ton of mysterious things happen via keyboard shortcuts.  The only one that catches the eye is c, for creating a new jira in a big popup.  Oops!!  

SO glad to be able to turn this off.  On behalf of all fast typers, THANKS!!

Marla

[Eric Lambart]

Well, the real answer is: You can turn off some (there's a setting in your User Profile editor), but likely not the ones that are annoying you in the first place.

I think these people have a strange concept of what it means to "disable" a feature. I think some lazy dev just added the preference setting, made sure it disabled a few things... and then closed that JIRA ticket.

Atlassian shortcuts (in ALL their products) are not only dangerous in their implementation (it's so easy to trigger some unintended effect with a wrong keystroke) but turning them off DOES NOT WORK.

It appears that some are disabled; for instance "m" (the only one I remember) no longer opens a comment edit box (which, of course, is going to placed be as far as possible from the comment you're following-up on)...

But the shortcut which is most infuriating to me (because it gets in the way of my productivity WAY more than any other) still isn't disabled:

When you are looking at an issues, the up/down arrows (and Home/End, PgUp/PgDn) all effect the issues list, NOT the issue that is currently focused. I'd be happy if they NEVER affected the issues list, but the fact that you can EXPLICITLY focus (by clicking) a specific issue, and JIRA STILL COMMANDEERS the keyboard scrolling functionality is inexcusable.

It's absolutely ridiculous that I can't use the keyboard to scroll through an issue.

I am a keyboard-centric user who normally LOVES to use and define keyboard shortcuts. Atlassian's shortcuts are never helpful (and often harmful) to me, and are completely unconfigurable, so I've given up trying to use them. I wish JIRA would give up on forcing them on me.

Please respect our  preference settings.

[Jyoti Shankar]

Please let us disable keyboard shortcuts in confluence. They are counter-productive and are negatively impacting our productivity.

[Louis Mamakos]

Likewise, on OSX, I enjoy using control-B, control-K and other emacs-like editing commands that are a standard behavior in OSX text widgets and work in other browser textareas.  Disabling keyboard shortcuts should let me use these. 

[Louis Mamakos]

This issue has been open so long, that "OSX" is now called "macOS" 4 years later.   And the issue has yet to be addressed in any meaningful way.

[Christoph Blau]

I also want those keyboard shortcuts completely disabled. They are just annoying me

[Sonny Rajagopalan]

Using macosx for Jira is a plain nightmare for me. Wait... something happened. I dont know what I did, and I have no idea whether or not the epic or story or what have you I was working on needs to be reworked. One part of this is the terrible new macosx keyboard (ridiculous tactile feedback). the large part of this is really JIRA's interface. I would like a way to turn off keyboard shortcuts (cannot find it at all!).

[Armen Yampolsky]

I second this. I am constantly losing my work because the horrid butterfly keyboard issues phantom keystroke combinations that navigate away from the page.

I would love to disable all keyboard shortcuts in JIRA.

[John Kim]

Same here. Hate these keyboard shortcuts in Atlassian.

[Jon Austin]

This completely breaks my browser workflow (can't even use option-# to switch to a different tab).

Please provide some kind of solution to disable ALL keyboard shortcuts.

EDIT: In firefox at least the only real solution appears to be to disable all KB shortcuts for jira: https://superuser.com/a/1305827/118644

[Thomas Enderlin]

Same. JIRA v6.4.11

Disabled keyboard shortcuts but they still are in use.  Should be reproduceable by editing the description box on a ticket and then hitting ESC will cancel your edits and close the description box edit.

[dominicwatson]

aaargggh I hate this feature so much. I've pressed keyboard shortcuts about 10,000 times and the amount of times I actually intended to use them was exactly ZERO.

Whilst typing in a box I do not want to:

 - Close the issue

 - Reopen it

 - Assign it to myself 

I don't want or intend to ever use the keyboard shortcuts. I'm a developer who literally just comes on to click a couple of things and write stuff. 

[Matt Tse]

@dominicwatson , you can disable the shortcuts by going to the ? menu from the top right section of the navigation bar and clicking on Keyboard shortcuts > Click the toggle for the shortcuts.

[james devona]

Thank you!!!

[Richard Hawker]

Doesn't work, even after logging out and back in again, press e and suddenly I'm in edit mode. Please fix this annoying and dangerous feature.

[Michael King]

Adding a way, hidden deeply in the "help" menu with NO INDICATION that it is for changing settings is NOT a good flow for this.

The team who added the page under help made something nice - but completely undid all the niceness of that update by putting it somewhere no one would look to disable a SETTING.

I cannot understand how a company that makes project management software can be so bad at making sensible software.

[Jacek Nowak]

It seems like I've joined the club after updating from some old 7.3.X to 8.5.X. For Polish users (and probably anyone else using diacritical marks) it affects typing on Internet Explorer. I know the browser is old and no longer supported but because our users are still using it for some Java based internal application, sometimes they do it for other purposes like Jira too.

Making long story short. If you press "Alt (right Alt) + S" with Polish language set in the system you will get "ś" letter. Unfortunately if you press that combination while editing any form it will be submitted. In old version it wasn't the case. Now it is and there is no option to disable the shortcut. Just ridiculous...

As far as I know left Alt should be considered as normal Alt while right Alt (Alt Gr) is combination of Ctrl + Alt. It is used in some languages for the reason mentioned above - diacritical marks. However it doesn't matter which combination I press on IE as it has Alt key only as a modifier... Both of these combinations contain Alt...