Navigation in the text editor is inconvenient

Description

Long text navigation with arrow keys is mixed with the history and chat navigation. For example, I copy a big piece of text from somewhere else and I want to get to the very start of it to insert ‘>’ and make it look like a quote or ``` if it’s a piece of code.

Steps to reproduce

• press <kbd>Home</kbd> but it only moves the cursor to the beginning of the current line
• press <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>Home</kbd> but instead the chat window scrolls to top
• <kbd>PageUp</kbd>/<kbd>PageDown</kbd> don’t work in the editor and scroll the chat window instead.
• press and hold <kbd>Up</kbd> but after the cursor gets to the first line the previous messages pop up (I expect this to happen on <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>Up</kbd>/<kbd>Down</kbd> as it’s implemented in Gajim and Psi, for example)

So it’s quite inconvenient to work with long text. I usually don’t need to scroll the chat window from keyboard and expect all the usual shortcuts to work in the text editor only. One way I found to get to the beginning of the text is to press <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>Shift</kbd>+<kbd>Home</kbd> and then <kbd>Left</kbd> to deselect the text. I think it’s better to either make such mixed navigation optional or apply it to the chat window only if it’s explicitly focused.

Version information

• Platform: web (in-browser), same applies to the desktop version
• Browser: Chrome 60.0.3112.78
• OS: Debian testing amd64
• URL: https://riot.im/develop/ 4b8764c07074-react-5752345b8082-js-bdb90b4b334f

[jcsteh]

I get bitten on a daily basis by control+home/control+end not working as expected in the editor (i.e. scrolling instead of jumping to start/end of editor message). I’m a screen reader user (and thus keyboard only user), and while this isn’t screen reader specific, I wonder if it impacts keyboard only users more; i.e. perhaps most users just use the mouse to jump to the start/end of multi-line messages.

[rkfg]

I’m used to bash/irssi/weechat so I expect <kbd>↑</kbd> to take me to the previous message.

It’s fine if the messages you usually type are short. However, if they’re multiline it’s pretty easy to accidentally jump to the previous message while you only wanted to skim through the current message. IRC doesn’t generally allow multiline messages so it’s not much of a problem there but there’s no such limitation in any modern messenger. I agree, this should be configurable.

As for the other notes I mostly agree with you, I just tried every possible way to do what I wanted. Basically, making <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>Home</kbd>/<kbd>End</kbd> to work inside the text editor only and allowing to scroll through the history with <kbd>Ctrl</kbd> is all I want.