Re: evolution 1.4.0 packages for Red Hat Linux 9

[Chris Rouch <cdvr pobox com>]

On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 16:45, Jonathan Pryor wrote:
> The easy question first: to enable the Cc: field (and Bcc, and
> Reply-To), open a new email message and click View->Cc Field, View->Bcc
> Field, etc.  They're all in the View menu.

Obvious really - I should have spotted this.
> 
> As for emacs keybindings, you probably need to go to the Keyboard
> Shortcuts preferences panel (Applications->Preferences->Keyboard
> Shortcuts), and change the "Text editing shortcuts" drop-down to Emacs.
> 
> However, this "solution" appears to be problematic, as the application
> gets to handle keypresses before the text widget.  Thus, Alt+F (M-F)
> opens the File menu, instead of moving forward a word, Ctrl+A selects
> all text, instead of moving the cursor to the beginning of the line,
> etc.  Keypresses that aren't handled by the application (e.g. Ctrl+B in
> gedit) are passed through to the text widget.

Thanks for that. This seems to be exactly the wrong place for this
option - I'd say keyboard shortcuts refer to menu items not to a text
widget.

As you say evolution seems to see the ctrl-a etc before the text widget
does. Under gnome 1.4/evolution 1.08/redhat 7.2 which is what I use at
work the "select all" menu item still claims to have ctrl-a as a
shortcut, but with emacs mode enabled, ctrl-a does what I expect - moves
the cursor to the beginning of the line.

IMO a good use for the keboard shortcuts menu would be to allow a user
to set arbitrary key binding to a set of common actions (select all,
undo, redo etc). I remember being able to do this on the fly with some
Gtk applications by pressing the desired keys when the menu option was
highlighted, though I can't get evolution to do it.

> In short, this seems to be a Gnome issue more than an Evolution issue. 
> The only possible solution I can think of is to change the default
> shortcut modifiers so they don't conflict with Emacs modifiers.  For
> example, instead of using Alt+<Alfa-Num> to open a menu, use the Windows
> key, e.g. Win+<Alfa-Num>.  This doesn't handle the use of Ctrl, though. 
> I suspect there is no real solution to this (except, possibly, having
> the text box handle keypresses before the application, which could lead
> to more confusion).  Sorry.

I don't recall this behaviour on the evolution that came with rh9 though
(It's possible that I just didn't notice 'cos my main box was running
7.2 until last weekend), which would imply that it's an evo problem.
Either way it's a bug, it's just a matter of which bugzilla it gets
filed in.

Chris