Re: [Evolution-hackers] Proposed Keyboard Navigation for Evolution Mail Reader and Calendar

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-06-05 at 10:49, Calum Benson wrote:
> Just doing a really quick browse through the 1.2.4 menus, for example,
> Ctrl-D for Edit->Delete seems pretty superfluous as Del also works (and
> is the HIG recommendation).  Ctrl-Shift-B for 'Clear Search' also seems
> a bit unnecessary, as there's a button right beside the text field
> (making the menu item itself fairly redundant), and the button's label
> could potentially have a mnemonic (provided it didn't clash with any
> menu titles) which would provide the necessary quick keyboard access. 

Yeah, I think back in the days we had mnemonics there but they didn't
work because of some bug or other regarding Bonobo out-of-procness;
although they might have been fixed at some point I think the original
feeling that shortcuts there wouldn't work just stuck.  :-)  Although
now we should probably fix this.

Regarding the presence of both the button and the menu item, I thought
it was generally considered bad to have operations in the main window
that can only be achieved through buttons  and not through the menus. 
So even if we added (working) shortcuts to Find Now and Clear, we should
still have the corresponding menu items, shouldn't we?

> Or if Ctrl-Shift-B is just the standard emacs shortcut for clearing text
> or something, it should be part of the desktop-wide emacs keybinding
> scheme and work in all text fields, rather than appearing as a special
> menu item.

The "Clear" menu item / button also updates the view, it doesn't just
clear the contents of the entry.

> Maybe you've already looked at this sort of stuff for 1.4, I dunno... I
> haven't had a Solaris build that runs yet :)

We have not really changed much in the UI in 1.4, besides some
HIG-ification of some dialogs (things like swapping OK/Cancel, adding
spacing, fixing capitalization etc), because we wanted to complete a
straight port before changing more things in the UI.

On the other hand, we don't have a post-1.4 plan yet, so all the UI
ideas are welcome at this point, and might have a chance to make it into
the plan.  :-)

-- Ettore