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

["Michael Ross" <michael e ross gmail com>]

On 9/27/07, Hans Breuer <hans breuer org > wrote:

At least Esc would confuse me if it is the key to leave text editing mode
without also reverting the last text edit.

Because other programs have used Esc to abort things, I will often hit it as one of several last resorts with programs I am just learning. 

Esc is very easy to find with the left hand.  Shift+Esc could be a useful alternative, but small hands than mine might find it uncomfortable.  Laptops are a different story.  There are always problems because there are different hands and different habits..


My early experiences with computing were with CAD programs.  Pre-Windows there was AutoCad (DOS) and a number of UNIX based systems.  Heavy users of CAD, which has a very strong mouse or stylus use component like Dia, would quickly find that placing the left hand on the keyboard and the right on the mouse and using as many left hand keystroke shortcuts as possible was the most productive manner of operating the programs.

These programs had command line interfaces.  In Autocad there was something called AutoLisp that let you compose series of actions and call them with a keystroke combo.  The Unix programs often had cascading menus that you could type the first letter of a command in the active menu.  You could memorize cryptic combinations to do complex tasks and it was very fast.  Cadkey numbered every menu option and you could type in strings of numbers to run the various functions.  Windows killed that. 

Best of all was the mapkey function of ProEngineer.  A text file with simple syntax allowed you to compose very involved series of commands with pauses for numeric or text input.  Because of the command line input you had to do nothing with the cursor to activate these.  Anytime the window was active, if you typed, it was looking for mapkey macros to activate.  We had some that were 700 lines of code for automating harness drawing functions.  You could record keystrokes ti write the mapkeys very quickly.  It was incredibly fast if you learned to use it, but it was all lost in the migration to Windows where new customers were convinced that Windows would be better. 

Now most systems make you resort to Visual Basic to compose macros which, while it is more powerful, it is much more complicated and requires more learning to use it.  My current CAD system Solidworks has never made it easy to activate macros by keyboard input, so you have to stop drawing with the mouse and go find the icon for it or pull down menus and open up a browser box.  They allow for simple Alt,Sht,Ctl combos but they have locked down a bunch of them for features that not everyone uses.  I have to make literally dozens of mouse picks to do things I used to type two letters to do.

I guess I am going to try voice control if my right hand starts numbing up again.

So that would be my wish - to call macros with simple left handed key combos.  The easier it is to write or record those macros the better of course.  Anything to off load activity from the mouse hand (actually I use trackballs because they are more ergonomic) is good for productivity and for the health of the mouse hand.

Is at all possible to compose macros in Dia,  but I simply don't know how to do it?

Mike

-- 
Michael Ross
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