Re: gconf key for the equivalent of F7?

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 09:25 -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> Hi All:
> 
> There is a convention of having the user press F7 to enable caret 
> browsing.  For example, when running Firefox, one can press F7 to 
> enable the caret in the document content and you can then arrow around 
> the content and select/copy text.  yelp has something similar, which I 
> believe is controlled by its "use_caret" gconf key.
> 
> I'm curious if there would be any interest/desire in a general 
> "caret_navigation" key?  Perhaps 
> /desktop/interface/gnome/caret_navigation?  The general assumption I'm 
> making is that if you need caret navigation in one place, you're likely 
> to need everywhere.  Setting this key can then be managed in one spot 
> and not require the user to have to remember to press F7 in each 
> application where they need caret navigation.

Epiphany and Evolution also both respond to F7 to enable
caret navigation.  (And, by the way, though Yelp stores
this in GConf, it also responds to F7.)  We're seeing
more and more applications use an HTML renderer for core
parts of their interfaces, such as Gwibber, and Empathy
with the Adium theme.

I also wonder if non-editable GtkTextView widgets should
be doing something here.

If we had a desktop-wide setting (possibly propagated by
an xsetting), then GTK+/Gecko/WebKit/etc could just pick
it up and do the right thing, without any extra work from
application developers.

--
Shaun