Re: accel should be _accel in UI XML files

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com> writes:

> Hi Darin,
> 
> On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Darin Adler wrote:
> > Keyboard accelerators have to be translated along with the wording of
> > menu item. Some of them might stay the same, but some might have to
> > change.
> 
> 	Strange, I have never considered this before. Kjartan can you
> verify whether we have translated K/B shortcuts before ?
> 
> 	I just ran gmc in spanish and got:
> 
> 		Cerrar Ventana       Ctrl+W
> 
> 	Hmm; so I suppose we could translate these, of course to a certain
> extent we are helped by the _File accelerateor naming scheme that makes
> menu navigation translatable.
> 
> 	So; are foreign people just used to wierd keybindings ?

We discussed this at some length in the context of GTK+, and the
what everybody told us is that they _didn't_ want the accelerators
translated. (Meaning hotkeys, not underline shortcuts for menu
navigation)

As I recall the rationals:

 - People are often quite familiar with the English accelerators,
   and apparently Windows doesn't translate accelerators.

 - Accelerators are often pretty arbitrary in English to begin with,
   dur to namespace limitations. To list the first 4 accelerators I can
   thing of

   C-x cut
   C-c copy
   C-v paste
   C-w close
   C-x quit

  Only C-c corresponds directly

  Also note that for many languages, the whole idea of a single key
  corresponding to a "letter" in a word may be suspect. In fact
  for underline accelerators, where we expect the correspondence
  to be much closer in English, the Japanese standard is

  [KANJI] (_F)     [KANJI] (_E)     [KANJI] (_V)

  That is, the English underline accelerators are used and put
  in parens after the translated command.

Regards,
                                        owen