Re: Tab as completion shortcut

[Dylan Griffiths <Dylan_G bigfoot com>]

Christian Rose wrote:
> Well I wouldn't say that everything is inherited from emacs. Lots of
> apps use common bindings from Windows too, and I believe those too come
> from GTK+ defaults.
> For example, take
> Ctrl + x        cut
> Ctrl + v        paste
> Ctrl + c        copy

ALSO:
shift+delete     cut
shift+insert     paste 
ctrl+insert      copy

You learn these shortcuts rapidly (I learned way back when workign in DOS
IDEs in the mid 1990s ;)), as ctrl+C tends to do Different Things in a
terminal window that your keymapping would suggest.

> However, there are situations when emacs defaults and Windows defaults
> overlap. Take Ctrl + a for example. In emacs it positions the cursor on
> the beginning of the line, in Windows it selects All text.
> In GTK+ widgets, it seems to have the emacs effect. I think that's
> rather inconvenient, as I think that the Windows default would serve new
> users better. It's the standard on another GUI, is known by a lot more
> people than just emacs users, and most keyboards (even tiny laptop ones)
> already have "Home". There's also the issue that some emacs shortcuts
> aren't well suited to non-US keyboards, although that isn't an issue in
> this particular example.

I agree.  We have all these wonderful keys on most keyboards, it's trivial
to just add an extra case statement for them into your input loop switch.  
HOME fails to work in so many applications.  It's very, very, very
frustrating to go and attempt to use your properly labeled keys, and get
some barf like ~4 or ~1.

We need to unify our text shortcuts around a standard.  Since we have about
300million people familiar with the Windows shortcuts, I think we should
stick to those with the additions of proper handling of extended keys (and
the shift+delete style of clipboard handling).  We can always add the
ability to globally remap the keyboard shortcuts in the gnome control
centre.

What we don't want is a standard that suggests what shortcuts to use for
common operations.  What we do want is a standardized token that
applications can monitor for that signifies COPY or PASTE or DELETE.. Then
we can always have the input loop send that token based on what the user
says it should be.  Although there are some special cases where applications
will probably have different keyboard shortcuts, so I'm not proposing a
total ban on "non-global" shortcut handling, just a decprecation of it.

And for those who have input issues, such as the disabled, we can simply
modify something like JWZ's xkeycaps utility to allow them to interact with
the applications without using a "Real" keyboard at all.
 
> 
> That's my opinion though, I don't know if others agree.

:)
 
> Shouldn't that list be a global configuration dialog, so that I don't
> have to edit it in each app? I.e. a common resource that apps can launch
> when users want to edit keybindings, and not a dialog that has to be
> reimplemented in all apps.

See above on my opinions on how to do this.
 
> > One other thing.. I don't know if this is already the case, but if
> > someone changes a "system wide" menu keybinding (like, say,
> > Preferences or Exit), that should be reflected in all apps..
> 
> That should certainly have to be the case.

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