Re: Treating GtkRadioButton as one focus point

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Tim Janik <timj gtk org> writes:

> On 15 Oct 2001, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> > This is not exactly the behavior of Windows ... in Window
> > both up/down and right/left seem to go through radio groups
> > in the order of the butttons in the group were added.
> > But we can't do that for GTK+ because the order of buttons
> > is currently ignored so many apps are likely to have them
> > in inappropriate order. (*)
> > 
> > If we make this change, there would be an obvious disconnect
> > between arrow keynav for focusing and for radio buttons.
> > One solution would be to simply turn off arrow focus for
> > containers by default. 
> 
> i think this is a very bad idea.
> i'm using arow keys a lot to move focus around, especially
> for two dimensional dialogs (where you can move focus to a
> widget horizontally and vertically) this allows moving focus
> around much faster than going through a single tab/shift-tab
> focus chain.

What's in your dialogs?

 - Not entries, since they trap left/right
 - Not spinbuttons, since they trap left/right/up/down
 - Not scales, since they trap left/right/up/down
 - Not combo boxes, since they trap left/right/up/down

So, you are basically saying that if you have big grids 
of checkbuttons, having two dimensional arrow key navigation
makes navigation faster?

Should we really be optimizing for big grids of checkbuttons?

> and then, probably less than 10% of my dialogs actually do use
> radio buttons, disabling arrow navigation just to improve enable
> wrap-around radio movements for those would be a hoorendously
> bad trade-off.

Because, of course, we are writing GTK+ for your dialogs ;-)

> how does radios as a single focus point interact with mnemonics
> btw?

Fine, I think, and if it needs tweaking, it can be done easily
enough.

 - If mnemonic's don't conflict, then hitting the mnemonic for
   a radio button activates it without focusing it.

   (Right now, if the focus was previously on another control
   in the radio button group, then you get the just slightly
   confusing situation where the focus is left on that control,
   not on the new active one. I don't think this is a big
   problem, but certainly can be fixed with a little code.)

 - If mnemonics conflict, then hitting the mnemonic for a radio
   button focuses it without activating it. Activation requires
   hitting space.

Regards,
                                        Owen