Re: [Geary] Poll Results: Instant search vs single-keystroke commands

[Stephen Michel <stephen michel tufts edu>]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 4:31, Michael Gratton <mike vee net> wrote:
> For the next release at least, there won't be any change in Geary
> regarding Instant Search, but we should keep these results in mind.
> Perhaps in the future, making enabling SKCs a preference might be
> worthwhile: For most people, Geary would work like they expect, but
> for people coming from GMail or vim, we could actually improve our
> support for SKC, making the experience much closer to that of
> GMail's, so it's a win either way. Prefs do suck, since Geary should
> Just Work?, but this might be a good excuse for having one.
>
>  Thoughts? Questions? Comments?

I am a vim user. I am also one of the survey respondents who preferred 
Instant Search over Single Keystroke Commands. A large reason for my 
preference was that I simply didn't use them very much.

After taking the survey, I decided to see what it would be like if I 
tried to use SKCs as much as possible, to see whether they would grow 
on me and understand why I hadn't used them before.

Here's what I found (or just skip to the last paragraph for my opinion):

The biggest issue is that SKCs are not a full replacement for your 
mouse. In order to swap panes, you need to press <F6> (or in the case 
of people like me who have media keys by default, <fn+F6>. Scrolling a 
thread or selecting multiple threads requires <up> and <down>. 
(Honorable mention: deleting a message is <backspace> or <delete>). By 
the time I take my fingers off the home row and found those keys, I 
might as well just use my trackpad.

Many survey respondents (myself included) said that "It's not very 
difficult to press control." That's true... if you're navigating Geary 
with a mouse. When you're bringing your hands to the keyboard for a 
single action, there's not a significant different between hitting <a> 
and hitting <Ctrl-a>. But when your hands are on the home row, you feel 
the difference much more.

Finally, some of the shortcuts were not what I expected. <d> unstars a 
conversation while <Ctrl-d> detaches the composer. I'd never expect 
<Ctrl-s> to be anything except 'save'. After looking at the help again, 
it's obvious why each of the keys was chosen: they're one of "First 
letter of the full action", "key to the right of a related action", 
"remove <Ctrl>", and "what vim does". Honestly, all of those would 
probably be fine after tweaking a few edge cases, but mixing them like 
this makes it difficult to predict which paradigm a given command uses, 
so I basically have to memorize them all.

With the current setup, the only time I found SKCs significantly more 
useful than their <Ctrl> counterparts was when I was cleaning out my 
inbox of non-actionable messages, since I could stay in the message 
pane and use <k>, <j>, <a>, and <del> without taking my fingers off the 
keyboard (and thus, those are the only SKCs I now use regularly).

In the end, I think that there is a lot of value in SKCs if we provide 
them with proper support. I agree with Federico that this is one of the 
rare times when a setting makes sense. I don't know what the gmail 
shortcuts are (I don't use gmail), but if they have significant 
conflicts with vim (eg, if d isn't delete) I would (personal bias) make 
it a 3-option setting so we can support gnome, gmail, and vim shortcuts 
each to their fullest extent.