Re: keywords as a core extenstion

[Raphael Slinckx <raphael slinckx net>]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 14:46 -0500, Adam Hooper wrote:
> > 
> > This has at least one advantages over keywords, immediate
> > copy/paste/open. It's easy to configure (just provide a 'type your
> > shortcut here' style of config)
> 
> You mean "copy/search-for-the-current-URL-via-Google" because you bound
> Google to Ctrl-V?
> 

No i mean, in a menu you have shortcuts to access a particular item
"_File/_Quit".

The url bar has a dropdown 'menu' proposing the different smart
bookmarks available. Why shouldn't these available smart bookmarks have
a keyboard shortcut ?

if i know google is ctrl-g, i focus the url bar, type "foobar" hit
ctrl-g and do a google search for "foobar" and the gtk completion popup
hasn't even the time to show up.

Pushing the thing further it would be nice to allow 'live' editing of
shortcut like gtk menus when you hover an item and hit some keys.

So it has 
* Non intrusiveness (i can type in the urlbar without worrying about 'is
it a keyword ?')
* Discoverability, even for someone who never heard of the system, it's
obvious because of the menu analogy that hitting the keyboard shortcut
presented in the drop-down will trigger that particular search, and
allows to progressively learn the feature
* Easy adaptation through gtk menu-like shortcut edition.
* Copy a search term from somewhere paste it in the urlbar, and of
course because of the gtk bug the drop down won't appear, so you have to
delete one char, then rewrite it and finally choose the engine, if you
know the shortcut, no more annoyance like that.

> I agree with keywords -- I don't see anything particularly wrong with
> them, particularly if the UI is in an extension -- but I can't agree
> about keyboard shortcuts.
> 

In my opinion, keywords are inferior to keyboard shortcuts as explained
above.

Just try with some non-experimented user, they all know that a menu has
a keyboard shortcut, but few will understand the concept of keywords
(that have to be configured, too, and it's not as easy as configuring a
menu shortcut)

Blah, blah, i speak to much, because i think it's a killer feature :)

Raf