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Keyboard

Move through Ebbe quickly with the command palette and familiar keyboard controls.

On this page

Ebbe keeps keyboard shortcuts simple. The command palette takes you to any screen, while familiar keys work inside menus, dialogs, and tables.

The command palette

⌘ K on a Mac, Ctrl K everywhere else, from any screen.

It is also a button in the sidebar on a wide window, and an entry under More on a phone.

Key What it does
Type Filters the list
/ Move through the results
Enter Do the highlighted thing
Escape Close

What is in it: New recurring item and New one-off item, which replace the palette with the form, and Go to… for every screen — the forecast, analysis, recurring, one-offs, support, settings, your account, and for administrators the administration screens.

That is the whole navigation of the application from one key, which is why there is no second shortcut for each destination.

Dialogs and overlays

Escape closes the topmost thing: a popover before the dialog it is in, a dialog before the page behind it. Overlays are stacked, so one Escape closes one layer and never two.

In the recurring item form, ⌘ Enter or Ctrl Enter saves without reaching for the button. This is the form people fill in twenty times in a sitting; the others have no such shortcut.

Segmented controls

The small grouped buttons — income and expense, per month and per year, bar and ring — are one tab stop. Once focused, and move between the options, which is how a radio group is meant to behave.

The rhythm in the recurring item form is the one that folds onto two rows on a narrow screen, so and move there as well.

Tab bars

Settings, administration and your account are tabs rather than one long page, and a tab bar works the same way: it is one tab stop, and once you are on it and move between the tabs. Moving selects as it goes — the panel follows immediately, there is nothing to confirm — and the ends wrap, so you can reach the last tab by going left from the first.

Tab again leaves the bar for the panel below it.

On a screen too narrow for the whole bar it is a button and a list instead. See the chapter on each page for which tabs there are.

The tag field

Key What it does
Enter, , or Tab Commits what you have typed as a tag
/ Move through the suggestions
Backspace on an empty field Removes the last tag

The comma is there because people type tags as a list without thinking about it.

Adding a category

In Settings → Categories & tags, the box at the foot of the category list takes Enter as “add it”, so you can enter several without touching the mouse.

Everything is reachable by Tab, in the order it is read. A skip link at the very top jumps past the navigation to the content — press Tab once on a fresh page and it appears.

Rows in the item lists are ordinary links and buttons rather than a custom grid, so Tab and Enter work on them as they do anywhere else.

The pencil that edits a row is visible on hover with a mouse and always visible on a touch screen; with a keyboard it appears when focused, so it can be reached by tabbing even though it is not always drawn.