Keyboard Interaction Primitives
Give every menu, list, and dialog the same keyboard behaviour instead of ad hoc handlers.
What it adds
A shared set of keyboard behaviours for activation, dismissal, roving movement, and typeahead, adopted by the app's existing interactive components.
What your agent is told to do
5
What your agent is told to do
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Inventory every component in the app that already listens for key presses — menus, comboboxes, tab strips, trees, dialogs, table rows, date pickers — and record which keys each one currently handles and how they disagree.
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Settle on one behaviour per pattern: Enter and Space activate, Escape dismisses the nearest layer, arrow keys move within a group, Home and End jump to the ends, and printable characters start a typeahead that resets after a short idle period.
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Move focus with a single roving tabstop per group so the whole group is one tab stop from outside, and make the currently focused item the only one reachable by Tab.
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Route dismissal through a layer stack so Escape closes the topmost thing only — a popover inside a dialog inside a fullscreen view must unwind one layer at a time.
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Do not reimplement behaviour the browser already provides on native controls. Re-binding arrow keys on a real select, textarea, or link steals behaviour users rely on and usually breaks assistive technology; the announcement side of these interactions belongs to Live Region Manager, not here.
Edge cases it handles
7
Edge cases it handles
7- Native elements come with keyboard behaviour already — links, buttons, selects, radio groups, and text inputs must keep it, so the primitives have to detect a native target and stand aside rather than intercept.
- Input Method Editors compose characters over several key presses, and acting on Enter or Escape mid-composition destroys the word being typed; suppress activation and dismissal while a composition is in progress.
- Platform shortcuts collide with anything the app claims — Command and Control combinations, browser find, and screen reader pass-through modes — so single unmodified keys are safer than combinations, and anything that overlaps a system binding must be dropped.
- Interactive elements nest: a menu item containing a delete button, a table row containing a link. Decide which level owns the key press, stop propagation deliberately, and make sure the inner control is reachable without breaking the outer group's arrow movement.
- Typeahead must not fire while focus is inside a text field, or typing a search term will jump the selection somewhere unexpected.
- A group whose items are virtualized cannot move focus to an element that is not rendered; scroll the target into existence first, then focus it.
- Disabled and hidden items must be skipped by arrow movement rather than focused and silently ignored, which strands the user pressing the same key repeatedly.
Definition of done
8
Definition of done
8- Every interactive group in the app responds to Enter, Space, Escape, arrows, Home, and End the same way.
- Each group is a single tab stop from outside, with a roving tabstop inside it.
- Escape closes only the topmost layer, and nested layers unwind one press at a time.
- No key handler fires during text composition or while focus sits in a text field, except the field's own behaviour.
- Native controls retain their browser-provided keyboard behaviour unmodified.
- Arrow movement skips disabled and hidden items and works in virtualized lists.
- The feature matches the existing design system.
- No existing functionality is broken.
Related features
Avatar Group
Avatar Group
Show who is involved in a compact space without a pile of broken images.
What it does
A stacked set of member avatars with deterministic ordering, an overflow count, and access to the full list.
How it works
- 1 Find the places that show several people at once — assignees, collaborators, workspace members, comment participants — and render them through one grouped component.
- 2 Order the stack deterministically by a stable rule such as role then name, so the same group renders in the same order on every load and every device.
- 3 Cap the number shown and collapse the remainder into a single count that is announced meaningfully, not as a bare number sitting after a row of pictures.
Copy the prompt
No account needed
Add this feature to my app:
https://addthisfeature.com/x/avatar-group
Stepper Component
Stepper Component
Show people where they are in a multi-step flow and what is still ahead of them.
What it does
A single stepper used by every staged flow in the app, showing step order, completion, and errors.
How it works
- 1 Find every staged flow the app already has — onboarding, checkout, import wizards, multi-page settings — and render them all through one stepper rather than the three variants that have grown up separately.
- 2 Keep completion and navigation as two distinct concepts. A step can be complete without being current, and a step the user is allowed to jump back to is not the same as a step they have finished.
- 3 Model optional and skippable steps explicitly, and show a skipped step as skipped rather than as complete or as untouched. A user who skipped payment details needs to see that it is still outstanding.
Copy the prompt
No account needed
Add this feature to my app:
https://addthisfeature.com/x/stepper-component
Dropdown Menu Primitive
Dropdown Menu Primitive
Give every action menu in the app the same keyboard, pointer, and dismissal behaviour.
What it does
A reusable menu primitive covering triggering, item navigation, selection, disabled items, and closing.
How it works
- 1 Find every action menu in the app — row overflow menus, account menus, bulk-action menus, toolbar menus — and rebuild them on one primitive so they stop behaving differently from each other.
- 2 Implement the full keyboard model: arrows move between items, Home and End jump to the ends, typing letters jumps to the matching item, Enter and Space activate, and Escape closes and returns focus to the trigger.
- 3 Close on outside pointer press, on Escape, and on the trigger being pressed again, and always return focus to the trigger so the user is not dropped at the top of the document.
Copy the prompt
No account needed
Add this feature to my app:
https://addthisfeature.com/x/dropdown-menu-primitive
How it works
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1
Copy the link
Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.
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2
Give it to your AI
Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.
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It inspects, then implements
Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.
Works with your stack
These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.
Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.