Re: Global keybindings in GNOME

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

...
> Thats a valid concern, and might be an argument for moving the hotkey selection
> out to the individual apps' preference dialogs. Of course, in that
> case we should
> use the same ui for this everywhere to avoid things like we currently
> see in beagle-search or tomboy... and we need  to handle conflicts,
> which is of course
> much easier in a central keybinding capplet.

Yes - speaking of conflicts, global keybindings tend to generate serious
problems for screenreader users, since screenreaders (as "meta apps")
must rely heavily on global keybindings.  Collision is almost inevitable
- thus there is a strong need to:

1) keep the global keybindings to a minimum
2) allow keybinding sets to be replaced very simply (i.e. replace with
an 'orca friendly' set, for instance...)
3) ideally the global keybindings would all use a common modifier key or
small set of keys, and this "meta" key could be changed in a global
place.

This last suggestion would at least allow competing
global-keybinding-customers (like for instance orca and the gnome
desktop) to avoid collision by choosing non-intersecting modifier sets.

In short, I think that any extension of global keybindings in Gnome
needs to be accompanied by such collision-avoidance work.

Best regards

Bill