Re: keybindings/feature requests?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, David Fallon wrote:

<snip>

> Bugs go in bugzilla?

yes

> More keybindings would be awesome! In particular, keys to toggle snap to
> grid,

I'll give that some thought.
I'm not sure if it is in the FAQ but you should be able to assign your own
keybindings by hovering over a menu item and hitting the keys you
want as a keybinding (as I recall this briefly stopped working when we
switched to GTK2 but was turned back on later so you might need 0.92).
Of course that is no substitute for good defaults.

> reset tool after create (and move to a menu instead of

I was thinking that if you shift click on a tool button it should not
reset after create.  Perhaps the Toolbox menu items should be made into
radio menu items that dont reset after create? (I'm just saying this
because I never use the menu items to chnage tool, but it may be a
terrible idea).

> preferences), and a key for each of the default tools, or maybe a
> "next/previous tool" key. This is something I'm capable/happy to submit
> patches on if someone can confirm what keys it should be.

I would very much like to see a single letter keybinding for the Tools
(preferably resonably consistant with Adobe Illustrator etc) but until the
text widget is refactored that is not a very good idea as Lars has
explained.

I'm not able to remember right now but I think I recall programs that had
a key that allowed you to easily toggle between the current tool and the
last used tool.  I all for making Dia an easy tool for people to migrate
to and please as many people as possible.

> Being able to configure what holding alt does would be awesome - it
> doesn't seem to do anything currently? The default should probably be

In GTK2 we would probably reserve Alt for accessing some of the menus, but
that would still leave Alt available for lots of other key combinations.

Other programs have established pretty consistant behaviours about what
Ctrl and Shift should do, thinks like contsrain the drawing (square
instead of Rectangle, or if the ratio is already locked holding the
modifier would break the constraint) or draw from centre instead of draw
from point, but those are just examples.  Hopefully we can add things that
people might expect from similar programs and that are comfortable and
consistant.

> the move tool, although it'd be cool if it was configurable so you could
> switch it to something you used often if you wanted to.

Hope that helps (patches always welcome*)

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

* my bad, i know i should provide more than just words and show some code!