Re: Tab as completion shortcut

[Petri Heinilä <hevi lut fi>]

thristian@atdot.org wrote:
> 
> I use Vim exclusively. I find myself going through the vi motions even
> in Netscape and sometimes in Windows. But I do *not* want anything in
> GNOME to have a "vi" mode. For one, if a newbie gets himself into vi
> mode accidentally ("Oooh.. I can make all my text widgets be `six'..
> I wonder what that does?") they will go through *hell*. Secondly, the
> amount of abstraction that the API would have to undergo to generalise
> between a fundamentally modeful and a fundamentally modeless interface
> just *scares* me.

Modeful "vi" like binding theme for desktop sounds indeed very
interesting
and has big hack value, but not as default.

API and implementation has to be restructured anyway, because gtk does
not
support rebinding of the basic commands.

> Some of you may remember when we had David "MacKiDo" Avery subscribed
> to the list, whose mantra was "Choice Is Bad". This attitude made him
> quite unpopular, as you can imagine, but he did have a point. The
> Macintosh, in my experience, has one of the nicest keyboard interfaces
> I know, because the user gets no options in choice of keybinding -
> anything you learn once you can use on any Macintosh. I've recently
> been discovering the wide range of GNOME apps that listen to Ctrl-W
> for Close Window and Ctrl-Q for Quit.. well, for Exit, technically,
> but I think of it as Quit - and this standardisation is immensely
> pleasing to me. I know we're not proposing each app have its own
> keybindings, but portability between installations is useful, too..

ChoiseIsBad thinking is good if we have common environment, standard
interface devices (like in macs), it unifies terminology, keep
thing same as once learned. However, situation is for gnome, we have
windows, mac, unix, beos, vms, nextstep, vi, emacs, .. users with
different input devices. Desktop environment should adapt to the
user, not user to the desktop environment.
 
> Also note that GTK+ already has a very cool way of specifying
> keybindings for menu-items: hover the mouse over the menu-item you
> want, and press the keycombo you want. Backspace removes any
> keybinding. I don't know if there's a key for "restore default". Not
> enough GTK+ apps remember their keybindings from session to session -
> if we get GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, I would suggest this is a
> "MUST" (as the RFCs say) feature.

Yes, this is excellent feature. I would like to see this kind
configure-in-context abilties on other widgets too, in particular
on toolbox buttons (and the tooltip then shows what binding it has).

To use this system globally it need management although. Instant
conflict
check is must. If new configuration conflicts program or desktop shows
dialog "Replacing ctrl-a: old command: move-begin-of-line: new command:
select-all. This affects on all applications. Do you want replace ?".
Or, it might popup the keybinding capplet and highlight, the conclicting
commands.

> The downsides I can think of are that the "live" key remapping has
> serious problems from a UI point of view: It's not obvious that
> bindings can be changed, it's not obvious how, it's not obvious that
> they can be cleared, it's not obvious how they can be restored.

There is a small set of basic things the user has to just know, like
right button popups context menu, this might be one of them. Learning
them belongs to the startup, crashcourse, whatever beginners document.

-- 
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