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

[Michael Gratton <mike vee net>]

Hey George,

On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 10:56 AM, George Barrett <bob bob131 so> wrote:
> 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 :)

This is an interesting idea. If we are going to add a pref to enable 
SKC's as discussed above, we need a mechanism to implement that, and if 
Builder has a framework that we could use, then integrating that could 
be a good approach.

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

I'd be interested in seeing what you could come up with.

TBH I don't think adding a UI for customising keybindings beyond a 
"Enable GMail Keyboard Shortcuts" or similar checkbox makes sense - 
most people don't care enough to customise key bindings, and it is 
potentially a high usability and maintenance burden.

It would be good to have the code for shortcut modes and shortcut 
management nicely compartmentalised however, so that improvements can 
be easily made from release to release.

//Mike

--
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>