Re: Keyboard accelerators for GTK+

[Valdis Kletnieks vt edu]

On Fri, 09 Jun 2000 14:48:47 -0000, Eric Buist <ericbuist@hotmail.com>  said:
> beginning with that letter. Also, every buttons should have a shortcut key. 

<begin user interface rant> 

Personally, I find the "every button should have a shortcut" idea to be
quite possibly hard to implement, or possibly downright dangerous.

First off, there's not that many *obvious* shortcuts (alt-S for save,
alt-Q for quit, and so on).  If the software also uses keyboard commands
of its own, you quite quickly get into the Emacs mode, where the "shortcuts"
are "escape control-x control-z 5" or similar.

Secondly, I make every attempt to personally beat about the head with a
large stick programmers who insist on putting in "feee-tures" that allow
me to lose my work.  Right now, the top of my to-use-a-large-stick pile
are the guys at Netscape - they provide a resource to force a "are you sure?"
prompt if you use alt-Q to quit.  However, if you alt-W the last window,
you aren't prompted.

Yes, you can restart Netscape - but you've lost all the forward/backward
and current page context...

<end user interface rant>

Having said that, I *do* support the addition of code that assists the
programmer in adding shortcuts where appropriate ;)


-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

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