Keybox and Keythemes

["Dan Kaminsky" <effugas best com>]

Here's the general structure of the Keybox I've been tossing around.  It's a
bit more refined now.

>From what I've read, the Xerox PARC engineers were never a huge fan of the
mouse.  It forced you to lift your hand off the keyboard, and was slow.  In
my own experience, I've found this is true.  In Photoshop or GIMP, having to
select the hand, move the image around, go back, select the lasso, select an
area, go to the edit menu, press copy, go BACK to the edit menu, press
paste, then to go select the paintbrush and do some cleanup work is
INCREDIBLY inefficient by mouse.  However, I've never had the time nor the
energy to attempt to figure out if key combos exist for all the tool icons,
and I'm an expert user.

I therefore offer up the Keybox.  The keybox has a couple functions:

1)  It lists the keyboard shortcut for the last entered command.  If I do
the work of going to the edit menu and selecting "Cut", I've wasted time.
The interface should still Cut, but it should somehow reflect how I could
have saved time without annoying me, Office Assistant wise.  A picture of a
key on a keyboard, with Control-C written inside, would work wonders in a
pavlovian way--and yes, this is more effective than just the shortcut in the
menu--if I've already gone to the menu, it's too late, ain't it?  And it's
not going to be onscreen for long enough.

2)  It allows you to change or create keyboard shortcuts for any action.
Suppose there's no shortcut for the hand.  I click on the key, press
control-alt-h, and poof, that's gonna control the hand now.  Granted, some
kind of dialog would need to pop up to ask if this was a permanent change or
just a this-session thing, as well as to ask what to give whatever last had
control-alt-h.  Boy, wouldn't that be a very easy way to create load
shortcuts--load an app, click the keybox, press the keys you want.  And, by
the way, this might make QuarkXPress not have the worst UI in history.
Finally, this could facilitate Keythemes, where users could trade their most
efficient keyboard shortcut lists for a given application.

3)  It allows you to list all keyboard shortcuts for an app.

The Keybox would always lock onto the last application to receive a command.
That should save the lazy focus people.

By the way--the Style Sheet REALLY REALLY needs to define a GNOME keyspace
that GNOME apps should avoid for all reasons except porting.