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

[George Barrett <bob bob131 so>]

On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 10:26 AM, Stephen Michel 
<stephen michel tufts edu> wrote:
> 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.

I'm wondering whether the keybinding system from GNOME Builder could be 
reused for this purpose? From a (very) quick browse of the source 
tree[1], it looks as though it should be easy enough to extract and 
re-purpose. There would, of course, be the pain of keeping this code 
up-to-date with the libide upstream, but the keybindings themselves 
seem to be plugins in their own right. Personally, I think pluggable 
key binds would be a fantastic enhancement to the broader GTK 
ecosystem, but for apps like Geary that are text composition oriented 
this seems like a particularly valuable feature. The number of times 
I've accidentally nuked an email because I tried to ^W a word is 
embarrassing :)

Failing this, I would agree with the general sentiment that SKCs aren't 
worth it. There's little point requiring people to learn a new set of 
keybinds for every application (I struggle enough as it is with Vim!) 
and custom Vim emulators are notorious for forgetting whole classes of 
movements, having idiosyncratic implementations of what functionality 
they _do_ claim to support, and adding a substantial maintenance 
workload. Builder's Vim emulation is also far from perfect, but it 
improves quite a bit with each release and using libide's keybind 
plugin system should make support for GMail etc bindings easier.

Thoughts? I'd be up for giving it a stab if people aren't totally 
opposed to the idea.

[1]: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-builder/tree/libide/keybindings