I dont think this was happening on dev, but in prod this morning, when I hit Esc to close a dialog (like trainer), the dialog will close but I will also get sent back to the dashboard. This can be somewhat problematic if I’m in a post and haven’t read it yet (showing only unread stories) but already know I want to adjust the training options for it.
3 Likes
Also, if you hit ESC while a long feed is loading, instead of just stopping the load, you’re returned to the dashboard. With oldest-first/unread only this is less of a problem, but while I was still reading with newest-first and show oldest story first, it would sometimes dive for a ghost unread story and there was no way to stop the loadinng.
I just fixed this for modal dialogs. However, I’m not sure about your finding, rdominick. Did ESC use to stop feed loading while looking for a story?
Yes – you got the stop signed “Oops, an error occurred” in the bar between the article list and story pane when you hit ESC. Occasionally very useful to keep Newsblur from loading too many articles looking for some unread story somewhere.
Hmm, that was definitely an unintentional side effect. The problem is that I want ESC to mean “close this site and return to the dashboard” more than I want that behavior. If a dialog is showing, I can allow ESC to close that dialog, but if it’s just the site, then the site should close.
I wish there were another way to easily cancel the loading of the site.
Doesn’t “D” close the site and return to the dashboard? That’s what I’ve been using for ages, anyway.
For me, Escape doesn’t seem like a good “Go to dashboard” key because it’s normally used to close things that are in your way or cancel an action. In my mind, I’m not *opening* a site when I click on the feed name - I’m just flipping through and looking at it.
I agree somewhat, but I added the initial ‘d’ keystroke because users asked for it. Since then I became attached to it, and then I hit ESC a few times not realizing I set the key to ‘d’. I think ESC makes a lot more sense. And I’ve now been hitting it regularly, since I load to not have a site loaded when I’m not on the tab. OCD-ish, but ESC is a far easier key to hit for an hourly action.
There still are a few places Esc takes you back to the dashboard rather than closing whatever was open. I’ve managed to trigger them quite a lot recently. The worst is that it’s data-destroying - you lose the article you’re reading.
One is the article/feed popups. This is worse for an article because the popup remains visible, unattached to anything, with the dashboard behind it.
Another is the filter options/site stats popup. This is an annoyance to use in general (why is the popup so far away from the button?) in that you have to click 3 times and move the cursor a bunch just to toggle between all and unread, which I need to do so I can try to find the article I was reading before I accidentally hit Esc and lost my place 
A third is the “Manage NewsBlur” menu at the bottom of the page.
Incidentally, maybe I’m missing something, but why is “go to the dashboard” a common action? I can see it’s useful for keeping people up to date with release notes, etc., but I wish it would only show up once a day or something. Most of the time I just want to start reading.
Is there some other way to close a dialog on the keyboard if ESC is supposed to take you back to dashboard? At least for me personally, closing dialogs happens far more often than hopping back to dashboard.
I’ve been bitten by the ESC-to-dashboard functionality a few times already, since I use show-unread-only and it’s a pain to get back to a message you accidentally marked read by opening it, opening a dialog and ESCin back to dashboard.
One solution would be a separate “Recently read” folder, which would also serve in the case you manage to hop over something you actually want to read with ‘n’, ending up in another feed.
I love the idea of a Recently Read folder! With Reader, it was always so easy to go right back to something, either with the recently read section, or with G+A (Go All [G+U went back to the unread-only view]). Now to go back to something I just read, I generally have to hit Minus to show all feeds, click into a feed, change the unread settings on the feed to show all. Definitely not as sleek…
Good news! I spent two days on this (along with the new Full view) but this is finally fixed for both popovers and menus, which should cover all of your issues above. This will deploy to www later this afternoon, but it’s available on dev.newsblur.com right now. Try it out and let me know if it works.