I've just thought of a way to make creating and troubleshooting bind files much easier. If someone would create an LFUN_REREAD_BINDFILE, then I could directly edit user.bind and then run LFUN_REREAD_BINDFILE to assess the result without closing and reopening LyX. Cool, huh?
I'd like to see a similar LFUN_REREAD_CONFIGURATION to do what Tools- >Reconfigure does but without necessitating leaving and reentering LyX. SteveT On Monday 11 January 2010 19:31:15 Steve Litt wrote: > Hi all, > > I think the user interface for setting keyboard bindings can use > considerable improvement. Let's start with the worst thing: If you've done > something wrong with the keyboard binding function area, LyX closes the > keyboard binding dialog box and prints an error message like "you can't > insert that in this list" or some other generic error, AND THEN CLOSES THE > DIALOG BOX! So you can't even experiment to get it right -- you need to > redo Tools->Preferences- > > >Editing->Shortcuts and then redo everything. Do this ten times you've > > burned > > up an hour, whereas if it left the dialog box you could do ten in ten > minutes. > > Also ugly: I could see no way to look up a binding by keystroke. This means > there's no way to know an available keystroke other than try one and have > the interface tell you "this is already bound to function bibitybop and > that needs to be disabled first", and then, as I remember, close the > dialog box. You can already search on function -- it would be wonderful if > you could search on keystroke too. > > Then there's the fact that some keystrokes seem to be magically excluded > from possible key bindings. Ctrl+2 is one, even though I removed the > Ctrl+2 binding that went to bookmark 2. > > There are other anomalies I haven't documented because they only happened > once or were intermittent or whatever. > > The cleanest way I've found is to just directly edit user.bind, in > violation of the comment at the top saying it will automatically be > written etc. Of course, to do that I have to close all instances of LyX > while doing the editing, so troubleshooting is once again a very long > iteration. > > Part of all of this could be solved by documentation, but a big part of it > is lack of the "principle of least surprise" -- the interface is just so > weird that documenting it would take pages and pages of explanations and > warnings. > > Thanks > > SteveT > > Steve Litt > Recession Relief Package > http://www.recession-relief.US > Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt >
