This time for the users: support the “h” button on the keyboard to unhide / hide hidden fields quickly. The “x hidden fields” switch is often not easily to be reached and needs scrolling.
(Other platforms do this already 
)
Because there are so many conditional rules available in Tape, I feel that this is more complicated than a single keystroke unhide option can handle.
In other platforms, there is only a ‘hide when empty’ option and the keystroke shortcut can make those all visible.
But I just don’t see that working with the full set of conditional field display rules supported here.
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Hi @CarsonRedCliffLabs,
thanks for joining in.
One example: rules currently can’t be build on the status of text fields (like empty or not). I have a AI enhancement field, which is only visible when filled (easy).
I have another field, that should let the user vote on the quality of the AI enhancement. I don’t want the field to be shown as long as the enhancement is empty. But I can’t show it by rule, as soon as the text field is filled.
So maybe this is the root cause for me to want to have the “h” keyboard shortcut
What problems do you fear? The “h” key could just show the temporarily hidden fields (not the always hidden fields).
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@dirk_s - that’s a good use case example. I’m sure there are totally valid reasons that some users will need/want the ‘h’ shortcut to unhide fields.
I certainly wan’t argue that it’s totally unnecessary.
Also, I don’t see a concern for having shortcut made available. I guess I just see it as something that would be harder to implement smoothly with the more complex set up opportunities provided within Tape.
While it may not be a perfect solution for your scenario, I might try the following set up to solve your example without the user unhide option…
- Keep the exact same AI Enhancement and AI Quality Voting fields that you already described.
- Assuming that the voting field is a category field, add a new category option on that voting field that states something like “Please Indicate AI Response Quality”
- Then set that field to have a rule to be hidden if empty.
- Then in whatever API call or automation action that you use to retrieve the AI response and add it into the the AI Enhancement text field, simply add a step there to mark the new ‘please indicate’ value in the AI Quality Voting field.
That way the field can stay hidden. It doesn’t rely on a rule which requires only a text field condition. And it can still be set up to display only when needed.
I almost always prefer to build a template using an ‘automated’ structure such as this.
Even if the ‘h’ to unhide keyboard shortcut existed, it still relies on a human remembering that they should unhide and use that field when applicable. And that will likely be forgotten more when it’s a manual step than when an automation suddenly causes the prompt to be displayed and ask for feedback when required.
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@CarsonRedCliffLabs I like your thinking 
I’d call it a workaround, but it works for me.
I think we should have more actions for text fields — checking whether they’re empty, whether they contain a certain value, and so on. I miss those options in view filters as well.
I’ve had to add category fields where I didn’t really need them, just because I wanted to sort by the result of a calculation. Alternatively, calculation results could also be exposed as category values…
Anyway — now that the main rework of records is done, the mobile app will probably be next… I’m sure the Tape dev team is craving even more feature requests 
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Hey @dirk_s,
thanks for the feature request. It’s always interesting to see which smaller improvements create real value in actual use cases.
I think we may already have something on our roadmap that could optimize your use case even further.
First, the shortcut for showing hidden fields is not a big effort and has actually been on our roadmap for quite a while as part of the final polish of the new record experience. There are still a few shortcuts missing, like closing the comment sidebar or opening a record in full page.
More importantly, Show Hidden Fields is currently only used for fields hidden via Hidden if Empty. We’re planning to extend this to Rules as well. For a Hide Block rule, the admin could decide whether a hidden field should also be added to the bucket of fields that regular users can temporarily reveal.
That would let you build your own Rules while still giving users the option to reveal those fields with one button or shortcut when needed.
Would that solve and further improve your use case? What do you and @CarsonRedCliffLabs think about this approach?
Cheers,
Leo
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@Leo that looks great! It’s exciting to see how you’ve taken the request and iterated it into something even better 
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