How to increase the speed of communication and productivity: The introduction of Vim ideology in the messenger

Hot keys (or shortcuts) allow you to speed up work with any product - you can recall the well-known keyboard shortcut Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V used for copying and pasting. Chat apps are no exception - for example, there are dozens of shortcuts in Gmail. The problem with these keyboard shortcuts is that many of them may not work on different devices or operating systems.

In order to avoid such problems, developers have to resort to non-standard solutions. Today we will talk about how keyboard shortcuts were introduced in Kato service that correspond to the Vix Unix editor ideology.
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Why do you need hotkeys

The purpose of the hot keys is obvious - they are designed to help users of various software products to save their time. Representatives of the Brainscape project calculated that using the hotkeys in an eight-hour working day can save up to 8 working days per employee.

According to their calculations, saving time when performing the same action with the help of hot keys instead of a mouse is, on average, two seconds. This means that if an employee does not use hotkeys, then with a working day length equal to 480 minutes and 240 working days per year, he will waste 64 hours per year.

Researchers used the following formula for wasting time wasted:



Thus, the productivity of each employee can be increased by 3.3%, which is quite a lot within the company. The real result, of course, will be lower, since no one uses the mouse continuously for 480 minutes a day, but the fact that the hot keys help to achieve significant time savings is undeniable. In addition, the use of hotkeys is just much more fun and can brighten up even by doing a rather boring job.

Working with e-mail and communication with colleagues, and so take up a large amount of time (according to some studies, up to a third ) of the company's employees, so the possibility of speeding up some actions in the process of communication will not be superfluous.

At the same time, different operating systems handle pressing hotkeys differently, as a result of which some shortcuts announced for a certain platform may not work for users of other platforms ...

In the course of working on the service for Kato business communications, we tried different versions of hot keys, but each of them had certain drawbacks. As a result, I had to create my own universal solution.

Vim editor to the rescue

The text editor Vim, familiar to any user of the Unix family of operating systems, has two modes of operation - in command mode, various named actions are performed (moving around the text, deleting characters, etc.), while in insert mode, screen editing of the text is performed.



The advantages of switching between modes is that the user does not have to hold down keys like command, shift or alt and drag his fingers to other buttons on the keyboard.

In Kato, users communicate with each other in different “rooms” and organizations with different colleagues, so a tool that would save time and move between rooms and organizations faster was necessary. To implement it, we decided not to reinvent the wheel, but to use the solution from the Vim editor.

How it works

Obviously, the command mode "as in Vim" is needed only for fairly advanced users. Therefore, by default it is turned off and activated in the settings for a few clicks.

After switching on the command mode (Esc key), you cannot immediately enter text - pressing some keys will be interpreted by the service as a command. You can switch to text entry and editing mode by pressing the i key.

Inspired by the ideology of Vim, we tried to make the most of the keyboard shortcuts available there (the full list is available on the website ).



After switching on the command mode, the product interface changes significantly, and it will not suit everyone. However, users who have overcome the difficulties of the “addiction period” and have begun to apply shortcuts can no longer refuse them - the efficiency and convenience of work increase as much.

The introduction of the Unix-editor approach turned out to be a non-standard move, which fully justified itself - Kato users thank for its implementation.

That's all for today. In the next article, we will describe how we implemented the markup mode in Kato, which allows you to create messages that are designed almost like this document.