On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 13:14 -0500, Matthew Nuzum wrote: > On 3/30/07, Shaun McCance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > They need to do their homework. In GTK+, Ctrl+Tab moves focus > between groups of widgets. It's sort of a souped up version > of > Tab, and it has the distinct advantage of actually working in > a > multiline text editor, where Tab just inserts a tab > character. > > Given that we've used Ctrl+Tab for this purpose for a long > time, > and given that we've used Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown for switching > tabs > for an equally long time, I don't think it's likely we'll > change. > > Ctrl+Tab has been used for ages as the way to switch between windows > in MDI interfaces on MS Windows.
IIRC you can do this with Alt+F6 too (at least I think that works in MDI apps as well; whether it does or not, it does admittedly include any open dialogs in the chain too). That's probably a more widely-accepted standard, having been first defined back in IBM's CUA guidelines, if not before-- so it works in GNOME (since quite recently) and on other platforms as well. Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown is used in Windows tabbed dialogs, not to mention other toolkits we assessed at the time. So for consistency, we chose to use that for all our tab-switching needs, dialog or otherwise, as we wanted to use Ctrl+Tab for other purposes. (We've since also made Ctrl +Alt+PageUp/PageDown work too, as Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown can sometimes be consumed by other focused widgets on a tabbed page.) FWIW, you can look at the original keynav comparison documents we put together here: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/keyboardnav.html You could certainly argue that they're due a revisit (developers have a habit of sneaking in esoteric new keynav features without really telling the people they ought to tell). But it's been a very large (and ongoing) task to achieve the level of keynav coverage and self-consistency we have today, so any potential changes need to be considered very carefully indeed, as the knock-on effects aren't always immediately obvious. (Partly because we don't have a good developer-centric database of existing keyboard shortcuts-- although we do have a reasonable user-centred one, see below.) > How do you communicate that Ctrl+Tab switches between groups of > widgets? It's not actually supposed to generically 'switch between groups', it's just supposed to bail you out of a widget where Tab has another function (text widgets and certain panel applets, primarily)[1]. It's documented along with all the other gtk and GNOME keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard chapter of the GNOME Accessibility Guide. (Yes, I'd kind of like to see this chapter moved to the main user guide too, where if nothing else it might be better-maintained.) http://www.gnome.org/learn/access-guide/latest/keynav-1.html Cheeri, Calum. [1] This is a long-standing keynav gripe of mine-- IMHO, shortcuts that are intended for specific purposes (like Ctrl-Tab), or that only work in some situations and not others (e.g. arrow keys for moving focus-- broken leftovers from gtk 1.x mostly, arrow keys were never in the keynav spec for 2.x), shouldn't really do anything else at all. But because they do, and people then stumble across them accidentally, they can get the wrong idea about what they're actually supposed to do. And then they complain when they don't do that. Ho hum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GNOME Desktop Group http://ie.sun.com +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
