Re: Patch for Delete key behavior (for dia-0.96.1)

["Sameer Sahasrabuddhe" <sameerds gmail com>]

On 9/22/07, Hans Breuer <hans breuer org> wrote:

> On 22.09.2007 00:42, Ondrej Mikle wrote:
> > I send a patch for the Delete key behavior in Dia. It is remapped to
> > Ctrl+Delete (or remap it some other suitable shortcut), since a lot of
> > people find it annoying that pressing Delete while editing text deletes
> > the object.
> Indeed differnt people have tried to fix this problem ;) In Dia's stone age
>  deleting objects was bound to Ctrl+D for exactly this reason. Than the
> more natural Delete key was used giving us the described regression.
> But falling back to some other 'random' hotkey for deleting objects is not
> the right solution, just a workaround.

I hate to be "sez who" guy on this, but why is Delete considered "more natural"?

> The real fix would be some managment of text edit mode, where all the
> usuful keys (not only Delete but also cursor keys, Home, End) are bound to
> text editing as one is used by other programs.

It might be too hasty to dismiss remapping to a different key as just
a workaround. It could be considered as a very important usability
fix, unless there is a tangible time frame within which the work on
text edit mode will fix this particular usability pain.

> > Those are just minor nuisances, but fixing the delete key behavior makes
> > working with Dia much more comfortable.

I believe there are far too many users who would agree with this statement.

> Although I'm sometimes bitten by deleting the whole object although I only
> wanted to edit text for me deleting objects via Ctrl+Delete wouldt take
> away more comfort than making the small text editing improvement.

Given the previous paragraph, I don't agree that Ctrl+Delete or Ctrl+D
would take away comfort. I am willing to bet that a huge majority of
Dia users have been bitten by this bug and find it uncomfortable every
single time they use Dia. It also seems natural to me that diagrams
that in fact don't contain text objects are very very rare, and also
the users who handle such diagrams.

I suggest that mapping "Ctrl+D" to delete objects should be seriously
considered as an interim fix. Given the cut-copy-paste triplet of
shortcuts, "Ctrl+D" is not a big thing to learn, and it solves a very
important user discomfort without waiting for some larger fix.

Sameer.
-- 
Research Scholar, Department of CSE, IIT Bombay
http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/~sameerds/