Re: more accelerator keys related thoughts

[Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 21:46 +0200, jan uos de wrote:
> Hi,
>
> besides my previous patch, I would like to express my wish for more
> default accelerator assignments. As far as I can see from my searches
> through the archive, this has been discussed briefly before but the
> conclusion was that it's not really necessary, because you can assign
> your own. This might be true, but I still think that providing default
> settings is very important for several reasons:

Agreed, if we can find more that don't hit other stuff.

>   * it makes using a vanilla dia installation much easier without the
>     need for additional configuration
>   * not all users are aware of the possibility to assign their own
>     accelerator keys (I guess there is a reason why this is a FAQ)
>   * 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 can see that picking sensible defaults is not a trivial task, but I
> would hope that it is attempted anyway. Especially an accelerator key for
> the standard move tool is very important, in my opinion. As Alt+M is
> already taken, I would propose Alt+N (I don't have a particular good
> reason for it, just that it's unused and close to M. But maybe someone
> can come up with a better suggestion?).

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

> The most important set of functions that don't have default accelerator
> keys are under Menu / Assign in my opinion. Providing default settings
> for those is especially useful as they are buried so deep in the menu.
> To be able to pick keys that are easy to memorize, I would propose to
> let all of these accelerator keys start with Shift+Alt. As this is
> somehow related to the standard tools, which all use Alt+Something, I
> think that choice would also fit quite good. (Or is there a problem with
> using Shift+Alt ?)
> Following that scheme, one could use:
>
>   Align Left          Shift+Alt+L
>   Align Center                Shift+Alt+C
>   Align Right         Shift+Alt+R
>
>   Align Top           Shift+Alt+T
>   Align Middle                Shift+Alt+M
>   Align Bottom                Shift+Alt+B
>
>   Spread horiz.               Shift+Alt+H
>   Spread vert.                Shift+Alt+V
>   Adjacent            Shift+Alt+A
>   Stacked             Shift+Alt+S

I don't see how they're related to the standard tools, but I like the
idea.  And they even all have logical settings! 

> Just to try these out and play around with them, I have created a patch
> that set these settings as the default. The patch is attached as well.

Applied!  Thank you.

> 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.

> Well, that's enough of my accelerator key waffle. I would really like to
> see default settings in dia, though. I hope this post might start a
> discussion to find a sensible set of defaults.

Here's a full list of the current shortcuts, generated with

grep '"<.*>' app/menus.c | sed 's/[^<]*\(<.*>[^"]*\)".*/\1/;' | sort

If you can find other reasonable shortcuts, let me know.

<alt>1
<alt>2
<alt>4
<alt>5
<alt><shift>A
<alt><shift>B
<alt><shift>C
<alt><shift>H
<alt><shift>L
<alt><shift>M
<alt><shift>R
<alt><shift>S
<alt><shift>T
<alt><shift>V
<alt>A
<alt>B
<alt>C
<alt>E
<alt>I
<alt>L
<alt>M
<alt>N
<alt>P
<alt>R
<alt>S
<alt>T
<alt>Z
<control><shift>G
<control><shift>L
<control><shift>S
<control><shift>T
<control><shift>V
<control><shift>X
<control><shift>Z
<control>A
<control>B
<control>C
<control>D
<control>E
<control>F
<control>G
<control>I
<control>L
<control>N
<control>O
<control>P
<control>Q
<control>S
<control>T
<control>V
<control>W
<control>X
<control>Z
<control>minus
<control>plus

-Lars