Re: [Evolution] How to define more keybindings

[Franz Schenk <schenk informatik uni-goettingen de>]

Hello Roland,

many thanks for your detailed reply! 
This relpy also goes to evolution-hackers, as the discussion seems to
turn more into this direction.

> The keybinding power of evolution, as well as for gtk which is used for
> implementation of widgets as well is currently not very powerful.

This is only part of my problem. Of course it is very desirable to have
a consistent keybinding schema for all applications on your desktop. The
motivation for my posting however was about the lack of
keyboard-navigation within  the evolution window, its not only the keys
for editing. I miss the possibility to jump forward/backward to folders
or vfolders, to switch from the preview pane to the folder list pane or
to the folder content pane. 

Maybe this is a quixotic claim as most users do want to use the mouse,
and maybe i have to move back to pine. but i am used to use the keyboard
for nearly everything and for me it speeds up things alot. 

> You can use a kind of emacs keys in the editor (gtkhtml editor as
> well as in the standard gtk editor which is used in forms and such
> I guess) but those are limited to one key only, one key with
> modifiers, shift, cntrl, alt etc, but no general key bindings like
> in e.g. emacs. However, with clever modifier assignments this
> should anyway be doable in the way you want. (Originally the
> emacs keys were also actually single key strokes,  as the
> lisp machines at MIT had several modifiers, the ESC, ^X, ^C etc
> sequences were added for keyboards where those modifiers
> where  missing).


> One file you can affect somewhat, even though it is not very general,
> is (location depends on your gtkhml version though):
> /usr/share/gtkhtml-3.6/GNOME_GtkHTML_Editor-emacs.xml
> where the "standard" (using MS-windows keys) is
> /usr/share/gtkhtml-3.6/GNOME_GtkHTML_Editor.xml
> There are some keys named "accel" there which have to be removed to
> work in the editor. This is also the place where you can change
> to own definitons.

well, this is a nice place to start and configure, but covers only part
of the problem.

> I find the whole keybinding issue in the X-window environment
> somewhat messy now. Every application make there own definitions
> and (hopefully) store somwhere.

Agreed.

> Preferably it should be a set of user preferenced keys which are
> always used for a specific funktion in different contexts, like
> "Ctrl-E" always goes to end of line for one user, and
> "End" goes to end of line for another user, and so on.
>
> As it works now in the gnome environment it is almost like this,
> but the behaviour is not consistent. Still some applications steals
> keys here and there. Sometimes it is possible to redefine the keys
> in the application, I'm using emacs keys in openoffice for instance.
> However, only based on single key pressings, no key sequences,
> like you use ^X^S for save and such in emacs.

And there are of course examples of best practice. In eclipse you have
the possibility to use predefined sets of windows-like or emacs-like
keybindings. And in addition you can define your own bindings for mostly
everything. This is an userfriendly environment for both clickadelics
and keyboarders.  


> Plase come with suggestions how keys should be defined and used
> in the GUI environment. It is a good start to be able to set
> preferences like "emacs/vi/windows" and such, but that is not
> enough.

My suggestion is, that in addition to the above the user should be able
to define keys for most important events concerning the GUI. Now i dont
have the slightest idea how much effort this would be. The question here
is, how many users would appreciate such a feature. 

Cheers,
Franz