Re: Keyboard usage on some Gnome windows not working

[Alex Graveley <alex beatniksoftware com>]

Speaking of Emacs, one of my favorite features has always been when 
executing an M-x command that the minibar flashes the shortcut sequence 
you _could_ have used for the same task.

I find that I learn the commands I use most often[1] this way.  If I 
know the command it's because I've seen it flashed in concordance with 
actually performing that action 15 times or so.

I would love to play with a system that only revealed accelerators 
somehow after I used individual commands a few times[2].  HIG-defined 
accelerators could be shown all the time, since they should be common 
across apps.

The idea being that less visual clutter, and a smaller set of well-known 
and trusted keyboard commands would be more friendly and cause less 
dithering.

-Alex

[1] Which is an ever changing set.

[2] For instance maybe revealing them slowly using an alpha blend of the 
menu item accelerator label which becomes less transparent the more I 
click on the menu item.  Or using notify bubbles.

Elijah Newren wrote:
> On 10/20/05, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 08:49 -0200, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> >
> > > No, there aren't. <http://asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html>
> > >
> > > I see there is some research showing that the keyboard is faster for
> > > common commands
> > > <http://ad-astra.ro/research/view_publication.php?
> > > publication_id=1508&lang=en>, but that wouldn't include access keys
> > > unless you were encountering particular dialogs or alerts very often.
>
>
> > When Tog says "The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is
> > faster than keyboarding." I'm curious what he means.  I'd
> > really like to see what tests were performed and what the
> > actual results were, rather than a one-line synopsis.  As
> > a mathematician, I'm suspicious of pretty much any one-line
> > statistical synopsis.  Imagine this test:
>
>
> Agreed, I thought the AskTog article was being overused and
> mis-applied in a number of cases, so I at one point went and read
> through the relevant article pretty closely, plus related ones and
> comments.  Unfortunately, it's been a long time, but from what I
> recall, the tests were done in the 80's or so and users were not yet
> familiar with shortcut keys (i.e. no muscle memory to "bias" the
> results).  In the explanations he provided for the mouse being faster
> than the keyboard, he said the reasoning was something along the lines
> of users need to do all kinds of shape recognition to recognize what
> the hotkeys are (including finding which letter is underlined, I
> presume) and then translate that into a letter, and then get their
> fingers to strike the right key.
>
> He did specifically say, perhaps in another article, that having
> certain shortcuts would save time over the mouse for very common
> operations (cut, copy, paste...; also, on a related note that I found
> amusing, he argued that command-p should be reserved for making text
> be plain (as opposed to bold or italic) instead of using the key for
> printing on the grounds that computers were almost exclusively used as
> word processors and making text plain was a far more common task...). 
> Now, the big question is--how many have memorized the shortcut keys
> for certain dialogs that appear?  Unless they show up often, users
> probably haven't memorized them and thus using them for those dialogs
> may actually be slower.
>
> Also, another interesting tidbit: A number of years back, I went for
> about 2 years without using emacs (or computers much at all, though
> that's beside the point...).  It was kind of painful when I started
> using emacs again, because I couldn't recall what any of the necessary
> shortcuts were and didn't have a nearby listing of them.  If someone
> asked me how to save my document, I would not have been able to tell
> them what the key sequence was.  But, I started typing along anyway
> and at some point, nearly out of habit (I guess I don't trust autosave
> and have developed this habit of hitting the save sequence early and
> often), I found myself pushing my fingers down in a certain pattern
> that I hadn't forgotten--I quickly pressed the lower left key on the
> keyboard with my pinky and held it down and pressed two keys in
> succession with my index finger of the same hand.  The sequence I
> happened to type was Ctrl-X, Ctrl-S.  I then went "whoa, so that's how
> you save, cool."  I had remembered where the keys were when I was in a
> rhythm, but not what they were.  For the vast majority of the emacs
> shortcuts, I had to go look them up and learn them again, but for this
> one and a few others, I relearned them merely by using them in this
> only-know-how-to-move-my-fingers when not really thinking about it.
>
> Cheers,
> Elijah
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