On Tue, 22 Aug 2006, Shaun McCance wrote: > Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:57:27 -0500 > From: Shaun McCance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: Alan Horkan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [Usability] Using Control-Esc and Windows keys to access the > start menu > > On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 17:43 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote: > > On Mon, 21 Aug 2006, Calum Benson wrote: > > > > > There's also a recent patch that will let you define multiple > > > keybindings for the same function, so that distros who are so inclined > > > can set both Alt+F1 and Ctrl-Esc to pop up the menu and keep everyone > > > happy. > > > > > > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164831 > > > > Excellent, good to know we have the underlying infrastructure to do > > this cleanly but why leave it to the distributions? > > (I need to figure out where exactly to patch but ...) > > > > The windows keybindings are fairly well known and I do not think > > there would be much/any harm having the enabled by default, or at least > > provide some way to enable this set of keybindings rather than expect > > every user to configure each of them individually. > > The harm is that there are a finite number of key combinations
With Inkscape I have seen the downside of trying to have keyboard combinations for absolutely everything It makes it that much harder to choose a keybinding for a new frequently used feature and to an extent it discourages developers from reorganising step by step features into tools which would handle a whole task. (compare inset/outset in Inkscape to the inset/ouset dialog in freehand) > > Here's a list of the keybindings (and I refer to the Windows key the more > > generic "Super" key) > That's eight keyboard shortcuts being taken away > from applications. [...] > Super hasn't had much formalized use. I would not expect applications to be using the Super key. > It's hard when Gnome gets run on systems that may have any combination > of Control, Alt, Super, Hyper, and Meta. (And I don't even know what > the Command key on Mac keyboards looks like to GTK+.) There used to be systems which used Alt instead Ctrl but their keybindings were otherwise pretty much the same. (I'm talking about both BeOS and an old version of Netscape I was running on some odd version of Sun OS.) This was at least part of the reason why Gnome made very little use of the Alt key. Gtk/X11 applications on OS X use the control key as they would normally. I would expect Gtk Mac OS X to use the Apple/Command key everywhere instead of Ctrl, as it has always been standard practice for applications ported to Mac OS. > I'd been experimenting with using Super to do emacs-like cursor movement > commands in GTK+ text areas (Super+E for End, etc.) Gnome has an emacs mode of text boxes and things like that doesn't it, so I expect the keybindings you are proposing would not appear in the standard defaults. (Given the amount of trouble most users have with Insert/Overwrite modes are a very bad default for beginners.) > I actually have my right Windows key mapped to Compose, but that > wouldn't be affected by any of this. What I'm hoping to be able to do is create a file with the 8 or so windows keybindings mentioned above and be able to enable them all in one go rather than individually, and preferably enable them without clobbering the standard keybindings. (I'm thinking an accels_rc file, something like windows_super_keys that I could drop into somewhere ~/.gnome2/accels/ and add these extra keybindings without too much complication.) Mainly I'm thinking of this in terms of my experience with the GNU Image Manipulation program which provides a set of photoshop like keybindings you can drop in place. > But if we add all these keybindings, then nobody > else can use them for anything. Users can hack > their own systems, sure, but ISDs aren't going > to tell all their users to disable such-and-such > global keybinding just to use their application > effectively. ISDs should be using a lot of restraint when it comes to keybindings using Alt or Super. (Inkscape isn't and it is causing some users to get rather annoyed about it.) -- Alan _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
