Back when Gmail first introduced keyboard shortcuts, Gmail was a completely different place. The shortcuts were beta-status, thus relegated to the Labs section, complete with warnings. And they were really only able to move between messages, start a new message, or reply to a message. Also, there were far fewer features in the settings view. Even though it was poorly organized, it was easy to scan every setting to find the one I was interested in.

Today, it’s terrible. Being more of a data nerd, I’m not usually one to make grand claims about usability. But even I can tell this situation is ridiculous.

Lately, Gmail has been randomly losing the focus on the text area while I am in the middle of composing an email. I’m not exactly sure what is the cause, maybe I’m unconsciously hitting the tab key to indent blocks of text1. Lacking focus on the text area, and being that I’m in the middle of bashing about 5 keys every second, before I realize that the UI lag is not the reason the text isn’t keeping up with me, I’ve made the grave mistake of hitting the most common letter in the English language: E.

E for Archive.

Not A. Not A for Archive. E. I mean, at least A is only the 3rd most common letter. There are a lot more keyboard shortcuts now than when I first enabled them. At least I didn’t hit M: for “Mute” This Message and Dump Me Back To the Inbox, Where No Muted Messages May Ever To Be Displayed.

If I’m lucky, I’ve caught up by now and am not still typing. If I’m Sean McBeth, I am not actually looking at the screen as I type, maybe reading some notes I have written down on paper. So I’m now in the Inbox and I don’t see that little, yellow box at the top of the screen asking me if I want to Undo Now or Forever Hold My Peace. If I hit one of M, U, D, C, O, or Y2 after I get dumped back to the Inbox view, that little Undo window disappears. By the time I realize what has happened, there is no visual indicator that anything happened.

Now where is the message I was working on? Is it archived? If it’s archived, is it in label:Archive or label:INBOX/Archive? Is it in Trash? Is it in neither, because it was only just removed from the inbox, which is apparently neither archiving or deleting? Is it muted, which is yet another thing, that which I really only understand as “not in the inbox”? What the hell is the difference between Categories and Labels? Aren’t Labels just a categorization system?

It leads me to think that someone on the Gmail team really has it out for people who use exclamation points. Thank God I am not usually very excited about the sort of things I’d take notes and then write emails from the notes on, because ! followed by Enter3 is for Destroy My Friend’s Reputation and Leave Me Blinkingly Lost As To What I’ve Done4.