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

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Thu, 2003-06-05 at 17:22, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:

> 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?

Interesting question... it's a fairly unusual situation to have
'action'-type controls in a top level window outside a toolbar, so it's
pretty much a judgement call as to whether that guideline really applies
to those controls.  Evo doesn't have a "Go" menu that lists all the
locations in the shortcut bar, for example, but it probably would if you
rigorously applied the same guideline.

Personally I think it's not unreasonable to leave it off the menus if
the corresponding control is always visible and has a mnemonic.  Or if
it does go in the menus as well, I don't think there's a compelling need
to provide a shortcut for it too.  I'd guess the sort of person who's
likely to discover and use Ctrl-Shift-B is just as likely to discover
and use Alt-C in the main window.  But that's all just unsubstantiated
opinion :)

> > 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.

D'oh, of course it does.  Obviously wouldn't belong in the keybinding
theme then. :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems