Style Guide (was Re: vi bindings for text widgets)

[Steve Hosgood <iisteve iiweeble swan ac uk>]

> Ulric wrote:
> > > On Fri, 3 Jul 1998, matt wrote:
> > > > what is the possiblity of someone hacking in
> > > > vi bindings into the text and text entry widgets?
> 
> Is there any reason at all why this should not be handled through
> resources? Surely the keybindings are not intended to be permanently
> hard-coded in gtktext.c?
> 

I know this is heretical, but I'll say it anyway.

I say keybindings should be a function of a 'style guide', and not settable
to random things by users. Here we are, championing GTK as a fine toolkit for
writing applications, yet we seem to be supporting two conflicting camps
at the same time:

One says: "here is a set of nice widgets, so that all GTK applications can
have a similar look and feel".

The other says: "you can set your own preferences for everything in your
.rc files in such a way that GTK applications on *your* workstation are so
baroque that no one except you can run them"!


Now, I'm not a fan of Micro$oft and their products, but I think I have to
admit that they had a sensible idea early on (probably in Windows 2 or
earlier) in that they wrote a style guide. Not every MS developer implements
everthing according to the book of course, but *most* MS Windows applications
have a fairly similar mentality running through their GUI. Occasionally, you
come across weirdo applications which break all the rules (like the RS
Components CD Catalogue, available in the UK) and they stand out in their
awfulness.

The same cannot be said of the X window world. Most things plumb new depths
of GUI design awfulness! I'd like to think that GTK is a step away from that
world, and toward a new era of quality applications.

To take a single example, at least all GTK scrollbars work similarly, and
tend to live to the right or below the thing they scroll, but some X
applications place them elsewhere, and/or use the idea of clicking left button
in the trough to scroll down, right button in the trough to scroll up!


Now, it is surely fair to claim that GTK should *not* allow random users to
redefine its scrollbar widget to work in the 'left button'/'right button' way?
Otherwise we'd all get pretty annoyed if we ever had to use each others'
workstations for a moment occasionally.

I extend this claim to cover the 'vi keybindings' argument. I think GTK
should have its own keybindings. For convenience they should be chosen to be
maximally convenient to the most users at the time they are laid down. From
then on, they go in the 'style guide' as *the* GTK way to do something.


P.S.
I have no argument with .rc files setting (say) the font used by menus, or the
background colours of buttons or windows. But changing *input* methodology in
.rc files is, I argue, not a Good Thing.


P.P.S
Should the GTK project even start to think about putting an informal GTK
style-guide together before GTK applications get so unlike each other in
mentality that they stop being usable?

--

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