Re: Command Buffer for Accessing Menus
Sorry for taking so long to answer this. Yes, the way you describe is one possible solution. But what if you accidentally mistype one of the letters, are taken to a different menu and have to backtrack? Or what if your finger twitches and momentarily releases the alt key in the middle of typing? I think interface wise it would be nice to be able to access all menus and submenus via keywords using the keyboard as it could provide a more seamless experience. In the extreme case, you could even ignore the pull down menus altogether, which would be nice. You wouldn't have to remember all the obscure letter combinations to reach every menu you wanted to go to. Ctrl-X atm is certainly a lot easier to remember than: Press Alt Press t to open Tools menu Press m to open Midi submenu Press a to open Automation submenu Press whatever key corresponds to the mnemonic on what you want there Release Alt In the case, where you could define these shortcuts yourself, you could even enforce your own standards for accessing menus in multiple applications. So you could bind Ctrl-X blur to the same menu in GIMP or let's say gPhoto. Even better, if you didn't know where a certain menu resides, you could do a search on all the application specific keywords. It'd be like googling for the right menu in your application. I don't know. Maybe my idea sounds a little out there. But I still think it would be a killer feature to have in GTK. Thanks. On 6/14/07, muppet [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jun 12, 2007, at 9:36 PM, ricardo colon wrote: For example, let's say Ardour has a menu called Automation. You would type something like Ctrl-X and then type in Automation. The Automation menu would directly pop-up. You wouldn't have to go through Tools - Midi - Automation or anything like that. Automation would be the full-length keyword. To make things quicker, you could have a full name and maybe a shorter name. So for example, you could type Ctrl-X automation or Ctrl-X atm. and it would mean the same thing. Even better, you could assign common command buffer commands to a single key. So you could bind Ctrl-X atm to Ctrl-F1 or something similar. Perhaps i'm missing something. Provided the application sets up its mnemonics correctly, how is your proposal superior to what we already have? Press Alt Press t to open Tools menu Press m to open Midi submenu Press a to open Automation submenu Press whatever key corresponds to the mnemonic on what you want there Release Alt -- Doing a good job around here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit; you get a warm feeling, but no one notices. -- unknown ___ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
Command Buffer for Accessing Menus
Hello GTKers. I apologize for the cross post. I confused the people who develop with GTK mailing list for the people that develop GTK mailing list. I posted the following email to the Ardour(http://ardour.org) development group. One of the replies suggested that maybe my feature request is better suited at the GTK level. So here I am. Here's the email I sent to the Ardour devel mailing list. Tell me what you think about such a feature being in GTK. -- Many times, I feel that having to drag over a mouse to a drop down menu and move down to the correct menu takes too much time and distracts me. By the time I reach the menu, my mind has drifted off to something else for a moment. I was thinking it might be cool to have something similar to Emacs command buffer. This buffer would be used for directly accessing menus. But instead of using obscure keyboard shortcuts, it would use keywords. For example, let's say Ardour has a menu called Automation. You would type something like Ctrl-X and then type in Automation. The Automation menu would directly pop-up. You wouldn't have to go through Tools - Midi - Automation or anything like that. Automation would be the full-length keyword. To make things quicker, you could have a full name and maybe a shorter name. So for example, you could type Ctrl-X automation or Ctrl-X atm. and it would mean the same thing. Even better, you could assign common command buffer commands to a single key. So you could bind Ctrl-X atm to Ctrl-F1 or something similar. Not only would you be able to access menus in the drop down list at the top of the screen, but you could also directly access sub-menus as well(instead of having to click through 3 or 4 menus to get where you want). In the beginning, you could have this work for the standard menus. But you could also have user-defined keywords for things like plugins. Imagine if you had a plugin called reverb. You'd highlight a portion of the audio, hit Ctrl-X reverb and it would immediately bring up the reverb plugin (with the selected audio as input if you want to). Anyway, that's the gist of my idea. I think keywords would be very intuitive for people and would work well across many platforms. You wouldn't even have to worry about keyboard shortcuts convention across different platforms. And I think it's much more efficient than using the mouse in many cases. - This could even work for something like GIMP. Highlight a selection, type Ctrl-x smudge and the Smudge menu might appear with the current region already selected as input. In addition, you might be able to directly access script-fu plugins. In any case, I'm not sure where such code would go, but it'd definitely be a killer feature. I'm sure there's probably some way to hack up something to emulate this kind of behavior. But I think it'd be great if there was somebkind of pluggable GTK architecture that all apps could support by providing the right hooks. Maybe the command buffer portion doesn't need to be mandatory. It could just be one of many different views or interfaces that could be used. For example, you could use a Wii remote :-) Anyway, Hope I'm not wasting anyone's time. Thanks. ___ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
