accelerators for stock items

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

This is probably a 2.2 item now, but I may as well bring it up now.

I was looking at how the GtkStock code handles the keyboard shortcuts 
associated with stock ids, and think that it could be improved by making 
use of the GtkAccelMap code (the reason it doesn't currently use this 
code is that it was written before accel map).  Currently the GtkStock 
code registers a keyboard shortcut with each stock item, and the code in 
GtkImageMenuItem, etc then creates an accelerator based on the shortcut 
registered with the stock id.

If it was using the accel map, things would probably be a bit simpler. 
The code in GtkStock should register the keyboard shortcut against an 
accel path something like "<Stock>/stock-id" (eg. <Stock>/gtk-ok). 
Then, the code in GtkImageMenuItem could simply set the accel path of 
the menu item in order to apply the keyboard shortcut, using either 
gtk_menu_item_set_accel_path() or gtk_widget_set_accel_path().

We would probably want to turn off saving of <Stock>/... accel paths 
when saving accels though, as they aren't really related to a single app 
but rather system wide.

Some of the benefits of this include:

   * ensures consistency of stock item shortcuts throughout the
     application.
   * would allow customisation of stock item accelerators.  Simply load
     a saved accelerator file with gtk_accel_map_load().  This could be
     used for localised custom accels, or maybe desktop wide
     customisation of the accels (I don't know how you would do
     notification of accel changes though.
   * make the accel_group argument of
     gtk_image_menu_item_new_from_stock() superfluous :) (although it
     can't really be removed at this point ...

What do others think about a change like this?  I think it would make 
the architecture a lot simpler, and makes more sense.  I don't think it 
would cause any API bustage.  I fully expect this to be ignored for gtk 
2.0 though :)

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/