Search hijack on hashicorp websites

Terraform
#1

When trying to search in page for a specific string, using the “search in page” keyboard shortcut (slash) gets hijacked and the entry is instead entered in some other search box, which does not search for the string in the page. This hampers productivity. Please do not hijack standard browser functions in this way.

I also suspect that this is not the proper venue to report website dysfunctions, but I was unable to see any obvious channel for that, and so this seems like the least wrong channel to notify Hashicorp that I would please like to be able to search in the page using the same keyboard shortcut that works on every other site (as well as in a variety of programs like less, vim, etc).

#2

Hi @emilal,

Unfortunately it probably is indeed true that the folks who built the websites you are talking about are not actively participating in this forum. However, so I might try to find them and pass the feedback on to them, I have a follow-up question:

In the browser I use (Google Chrome on Linux) the “search in page” keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+F, which does seem to work as expected at least on terraform.io (which I’m assuming was your main motivation, since you posted this in the Terraform category). I assume you’re using a different browser that has different conventions; if so, can you tell me which browser that is so I can pass that information on?

Unfortunately it seems to be a pretty typical convention at this point that the forward slash button activates a site’s own custom search functionality. Putting aside pages that were designed directly by folks at HashiCorp, I also see that same functionality on GitHub (activates the repository/whole-site search box), this forum whose software was written by a third party (it’s Discourse), YouTube (activates the site search box), Twitter (activates the site search box)…

While I’m not personally accustomed to pressing the unmodified / key for any reason in my browser (it was interesting to try it on various websites after learning about it from your post here!), it does unfortunately seem to be precedent that websites are “expected to” use that keyboard shortcut, and that’s perhaps why the HashiCorp sites do. I’m happy to pass on the feedback regardless, but it does seems like a bigger problem than just HashiCorp’s own sites. :confounded:

#3

I’m using firefox (on linux). I’ve also previously used extensions like tridactyl, which remaps ctrl-F to “move half a page back”, but issues like this one is part of why I wound up dropping it.

I know some other sites have extensions like that, and I actually have an extension installed to fix github, but would prefer not to collect extensions like that.

I’m also aware of Twitter’s use of /, but there’s something about that site which seems to make “find in page” useless.

Maybe my best venue would be contacting the firefox extension managed to turn it into a sort of “adblock” for that kind of search hijacking.