Re: PgUp/PgDown - why Shift???

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

John Nelson <jnelson lexonia com> writes: 
> Now this is very true, both Apple and NeXT had control over the keyboard,
> however don't most keyboards today have an "alt" or "windows" (blech) key?
> 
> And even if an older "non-alt" keyboard were being used doesn't it make
> more sense to allow the user the flexibility to select the keyboard
> mapping from a set of radio buttons?  That way both alt and non-alt
> keyboards could be accomodated.

It could certainly make sense to allow configuration of the "command"
key, though it would require changes to lots of code, so nontrivial.

The reason "Alt" isn't used is that it's used for the "underline
accelerators," such as Alt-F to get the file menu. Underline
accelerators correspond to a letter in a displayed word, and change
when interfaces are translated into other languages.

Thus if you use Alt for the regular accelerators also, it's very
difficult to avoid collisions between accelerators. Already the
underline accelerators are hard, since you have to use one of the
letters contained in each word to be accelerated. The Ctrl-
accelerators for an app with lots of them such as the Gimp would leave
no letters available for the underline accelerators.

> I guess its easier to just use CTRL and have done with it.  I really loath
> using CTRL as a command key though.  It makes no sense in a Linux
> environment where terminal interaction (e.g. "vi" editor, terminal
> communications, emacs, etc) rely on that CTRL key.

Really the only issue is that you can't have Ctrl- shortcuts in a
terminal program, which is kind of lame, but I don't think it's an
enormous disaster. FWIW you can't have Alt- shortcuts either, since
apps like Emacs also expect to get Alt. So using Alt doesn't help.
Only using Hyper or something would really be effective.

We could use NumLock, then you could accelerate lots of stuff at once
without holding down a key. ;-)

Havoc