Re: a few notes on gncal

[Eckehard Berns <eb berns prima de>]

On Fri, Mar 13, 1998 at 01:14:19AM +0000, David Wragg wrote:
> I realize that this is rather ambitious, and making Gnome useful
> quickly means that pragmatic decisions have to be made. But IMHO it is
> better to see GUI guidelines as a temporary measure, and in the longer
> term it would be better to provide mechanisms that make it easy to
> develop highly configurable apps, with defaults that happen to
> implement the guidelines.

Accelerator configuration for GNOME apps would be okay (I had 10 or 11
favorite text editors up to now and always tried not to redifine the
standard keys -- so learning new keys is no problem with me), but we will
have to define good standard keys. GNOME is for newbies. I found most
newbies just learning the defaults never aware of the ability to change
something. WinWord for example has accelerator configuration, too. And
Mickeysoft changed the most common accelerators with nearly every new
version. But all the people didn't redifine any accelerators but just damned
WinWord and got used to the new ones. So I don't think, that most users will
use the accelerator configuration in GNOME and thus we have to provide a
good standard.

A good standard would also mean, that we don't use fancy modifier keys like
the Windows95 keys on modern PC keyboards. We have to stick to a common set
of modifier keys. I don't know about any X Terminals, but I think Control
and Alt/Meta/Mod1 are the only ones found on any keyboard. Since Mod1 is
most likely used for window managers (with function keys) and maybe menus in
the future, we should stick to Control for the most common operations and
Ctl+Shift combinations for the second level. Just like the GIMP.

-- 
Eckehard Berns