Re: more accelerator keys related thoughts

[jan uos de]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 09:54:06PM +0100, Lars Clausen wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 21:46 +0200, jan uos de wrote:
> >   * sometimes setting or changing the accelerator key doesn't even work
> >     (at least I have come across a few boxes where it didn't. I don't
> >     know the reason for that, maybe some Gnome setting or something has
> >     been deactivated)
>
> Specific boxes, or just randomly?  Which ones?

I'm not sure. I think one was a FreeBSD box and the other was running
Gentoo Linux. But I read in one of your later postings on this list,
that this is a GTK setting, that has to be turned on? Might be, that I
simply failed to figure out how to activate that setting.

> Alt shortcuts are actually bad, as they clash with the keyboard menu
> navigation, so I'm not going to add more of those.

I can see your point. But wouldn't you agree, that not having a shortcut
for "Modify" is a major disadvantage of the default shortcut setting?
You can conviently switch to every standard tool, but then you can't
switch back! At least I found that to be a little bit frustrating, the
first time I started to use the shortcuts.
Maybe Control+M would be a compromise for Modify? Judging from your list
of used shortcuts, it's not taken and it also fits nicely for "Modify".
The only disadvantage would be, that it kind of stands out among all the
Alt+Something shortcuts for the other standard tools. But then again,
it's kind of a "special" standard tool anyway. :-)

> > Following that scheme, one could use:
> >
> >   Align Left                Shift+Alt+L
[...]
> I don't see how they're related to the standard tools, but I like the
> idea.  And they even all have logical settings! 

I'm glad you like my proposed settings and applied the patch. :-)

> > A final thought goes to the property box of a shape: I think Alt+Enter
> > is usually expected to open up the property window. But I am not sure,
> > whether this setting would cause any problem.
>
> Can you give examples of other programs that use this?  I wouldn't mind
> having one, and using one that people know from other places would be
> preferable.

Now that I come to think of it, it seems to be more of a windows thing.
For example in the Explorer you can use Alt+Enter to open up the file
properties (and also on the desktop and other places). But I think
Konqueror also uses it for the property window and as far as I remember,
there are some places in Thunderbird where this convention is used.
I can just speak for myself, that I somehow intuitively assumed
Alt+Enter would open the property box, but I still think, it would be a
good choice as a default shortcut for that function.

Regards,

Jan