Re: gconf key for the equivalent of F7?

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 19:16 +0300, Xan Lopez wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> This makes sense, but at least for WebKit depending on gconf would be
> problematic. I guess things will be much easier when we finally start
> using GSettings.


Well, right.  That's why I mentioned XSettings, which can
then be accessed with the GtkSettings API.  In fact, even
after GSettings/dconf, I think it would make sense to have
an XSetting, since it can be picked up by other toolkits
as well.

--
Shaun