switching between documents, was Re: [gedit-list] RFE: remove the tab when viewing a single file

[John Pye <john pye student unsw edu au>]

Steve Frécinaux wrote:

> John Pye wrote:
>
>> Hi again
>>
>> Dimi Paun wrote:
>>
>>> For a more practical concern, I hate to use the mouse, makes
>>> my hand hurt. When every document has a first-class window,
>>> I can switch between them with a simple Alt-TAB. MDI almost
>>> _forces_ me to use the mouse. Please understand that this is
>>> a huge usability concern for me. And I'm sure for others as well.
>>>  
>>>
>> I've often wondered why 'ctrl-TAB' doesn't work in gedit, for moving
>> between documents in first-in-first-out mode. This is a completely
>> standard MDI keyboard shortcut in windows, and it works in many other
>> linux programs, certainly Firefox.
>
>
> This *does not* work in any gnome program, indeed. It works in firefox
> and gaim only because they are windows program and this shortcut is
> quite common there. But it breaks the accessibility since ctrl+tab is
> used to switch widgets (for example with gtktextview where you can
> type a tabulation char). See the related bugs (dozen of them) in the
> bugzilla for more information about it.

I think that this whole issue is a bureaucratic miscarriage! Users
needing keyboard accessibility could just as easily have ctrl-escape
assigned for the widget-switching purpose. Most GNOME users would be
former Windows users, many of whom will be very comfortable with the
ctrl-tab keystroke being the document-level equivalent of the
application-level alt-tab keystroke (that GNOME has quite happily
adopted). This is a case of GNOME 'breaking' intuitive behaviour without
a good reason. I think that this is very bad usability for the majority,
for extremely marginal benefit of the few.

Maybe we could compromise by adding a ctrl-backtick keystroke, or
something similar, for cycling between windows?

Cheers
JP