Re: Keyboard usage on some Gnome windows not working

[Owen Williams <ywwg usa net>]

On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 13:14 -0200, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> 
> Amusingly, you wrote that message in Evolution, in which Ctrl+S in the
> composition window saves your message, but Ctrl+S does in the main
> window exactly what Ctrl+F does in the composition window, and Ctrl+F in
> the main window does something else again. Have you reported this
> unnecessary disruption as a bug?

This has always annoyed me.  What other GNOME program uses anything
other than ctrl-f to find? (emacs doesn't count)

> > If my hands are already on the keyboard, along home row,
> > I can hit Alt+C (Cancel on a lot of dialogs) really, really
> > fast.  Like, before-you-can-blink fast.

There is a gigantic difference between geeks who make their living on
their computer and regular users who use a computer to earn their
living.  Try going into an office where people are on a deadline and
need to rewrite a script in 5 hours, and tell them that saving would be
faster if they hit ctrl-s.  I've never seen _any_ of my coworkers try to
use the keyboard for commands.  They don't even use tab to get from one
field to the other.

Hiding the underlines until Alt is pressed sounds like a good idea to
me.  Most people probably don't even know what they mean.  People know
the most important bindings: cut/copy/paste, print, save, quit, but
other than that no one goes beyond that. 


> 
> Agreed, more detailed research would be nice. Lane et al. 2005 found
> keyboard equivalents to be faster for Copy, Open, Paste, and Save, but
> their experiment seems rather unrealistic -- people were given several
> practice runs first, allowing them to keep the keyboard equivalent in
> their short-term memory, when in real life it wouldn't be. (It's the
> retrieval from long-term memory which is the big time-sucker, according
> to Tognazzini.)

Again, this goes double for non-geeks. 

> 
> What do you mean by "best"? If you mean "quickest", then that doesn't
> seem to be true. Peres, Tamberello et al. (2004) found that on average,
> people who currently don't use keyboard shortcuts *strongly disagreed*
> with the statement "I would start using keyboard shortcuts if I thought
> they would save me more time".
> <http://chil.rice.edu/research/pdf/PeresEtal-HFES.pdf>

This doesn't surprise me at all.  Again, taking the person who needs to
finish a document quickly, the perceived increase in productivity is not
going to come from activating the save function faster.

owen