No Subject

["Oskar Liljeblad" <osk hem passagen se>]

A while ago there was a discussion on the gnome-gui-list about keyboard
accelerator standards. Most people would agree that it's impossible to make
a standard that would satisfy everyone, or even half that.

Alex Achenbach (achenbac@stud.uni-frankfurt.de) came up with an idea that
applications should bind its commands to abstract symbols instead of "raw"
keys. Example symbols are 'copy' (to clipboard), 'cut' (to clipboard),
'paste' (from clipboard), 'open', 'save', 'save as' and so on. The user
would be able to bind keys to each command, and an API call would look up
the key for a symbol.

However that method introduces several potential problems.
* Can applications use any name for its symbols? Yes, but the programmer
should make sure there isn't an equivalent symbol with another name used by
other applications. A style guide or "command symbol repository" would help
alot.
* What should the default key binding for a new (uncommon) symbol be? Let
the application choose - it doesn't matter. The API should automaticly
assign a new key if the recommended one is already taken. The gnome
distribution should come with reasonable defaults for common symbols
('open', 'save', 'save as', 'copy', 'cut', 'paste' etc).
* What if an app has a much more important command that should use the same
binding as a common command? These cases are hopefully rare, and I don't
know of a simple solution yet.
* ...

I guess this idea has already been forwarded and designed, so I'll stop
here. Tell me if I need to explain more.

Common applications such as data editors, mail applications, file
managers etc usually consist of one or many editable objects, and
commands which modify or process these objects ('cut', 'copy', 'search',
...) or the program in general ('quit', 'help', ...). The interesting thing
is that commands can be executed in several ways, though

* menus - "menubar menus", right-mouse root menus, and teared-off menus.
* toolbars
* widgets in application window - usually buttons
* keyboard shortcuts
* interprocess communication - in Windows this would be called Dynamic Data
Exchange (DDE).

Now, it would be nice if the user could easily configure the menus, multiple
toolbars and keyboard shortcuts. And it would be even nicer if the
programmer wouldn't have to spend hours implementing it. An API could be
created, where apps registers their commands, Gnome initializes menus,
toolbars and keyboard shortcuts from user "rc" files, and binds
item/button/key item to the corresponding command. The API should also
provide dialogs for editing menus, toolbars and keyboard shortcuts.

Implementing this as an API would make every application much more dynamic,
it would reduce code in even the most simple applications, and it would
bring consistency among apps in this field. Of course, every application
would have to provide default menus, and toolbars.

Good or bad idea? Tell me what you think.

Oskar Liljeblad (osk@hem.passagen.se)