I love the new context menu for references. Here are some thoughts on how the UX might be further refined.
Currently both left and right click open the menu (which is redundant) and you need to do double click to open the reference (which is inconvenient to some: How to get old link behaviour back?! (I don’t want to double click)).
I think it should
- only open the context menu on right click
The leftclick could be reused to simplify another, possibly configurable action. E.g.
- open the rem directly or
- pin the preview or
- show the preview (and not open it on hover)
I agree that the context menu is much more discoverable when it also opens on left click. So I’m not sure about that part.
Furthermore, since I like a Keyboard Driven Workflow, there should be a way to trigger each command with the keyboard (I love that I can aleady open the menu keyboard only by just highlighting the reference!)
We could basically just use Enter instead of Click, so
- Open: Enter
- Insert into Document (Portal): Ctrl + Enter
- Open in other Pane: Shift + Enter
- For
Alias(which is currently Enter) we could use Alt + A again to have it consistent.
I’m not sure if opening the context menu on highlight is the best, at least as long as there are no editor modes (like Vim or Jupyther notebook) and you might highlight a lot of links when navigating the page with a cursor in the text. We could also once a reference is highlighted
- open the context menu only on Enter
- show the preview on Space once highlighted.
As noted in Convert every text-reference into a Rem Reference function maybe also add a command to unlink the reference (shortcut: Backspace or Delete).