Re: WM standards

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Carlos Pereira wrote:
> > It's F11 (which is also the shortcut that's tentatively listed in the
> > HIG).
>
> What is HIG?

HIG is the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines document (currently in draft
format).  The section on standard keyboard shortcuts is here:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig/keyboard.html#standard-shortcuts

> I will gladly change to F11, if that seems to be what people
> is setting as a tentive standard. However, what is the rationale
> for that? a full screen is a ver intimidating state, where
> basically nothing is available: no menus, no root window, etc...

Well, on Windows at least, Full Screen mode pretty much always leaves
you with a graphical pushbutton for getting back to non-full-screen
mode, although each app handles it differently.  In IE6 it's one of
three small buttons in the top right of the screen, for example, whereas
in Office it's in the form of a floating toolbar IIRC.  Also in Windows
Full Screen mode, pressing F10 pops up the application's menu bar, and
there's often an option on any right-click menus for getting back to the
normal window size.  So you're spoiled for choice really :)  

> I will try F1---F12, but not before ;-) are there good reasons to
> not use Escape?

Well, it's certainly possible that the application may need to use Esc
for its own purposes, usually for cancelling an in-progress operation
(e.g. loading a web-page, running a search).

That said, I'm not convinced that F11 is a great choice either... some
laptop keyboards don't have function keys at all, and some keyboards
only have ten.  I chose it for inclusion in the HIG mostly because a lot
of apps on other platforms use it, but if there is a better suggestion
then I'm quite happy to change it.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems