Re: user input/app architecture

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 9:43 PM, Maximilian Schneider
<max schneidersoft net> wrote:

> My first question is regarding keyboard input. My first attempt to
> realize keyboard input was to capture keystrokes, but doing so caused
> problems with the mouse events. Mainly click events coming out as
> keystrokes.

I don't wish to be rude or start any kind of nasty war, but as someone
who has grappled with this issue in a "big" app in which there is a
very high premium attached to having every single user action
accessible via keybindings, i will say this: i think that GTK's key
handling architecture is hopelessly baroque, probably to the point of
being almost "broke" in this area.

There are so many ways to set up some association between a key event
and some action that is just boggles the mind. You've discovered one
that I didn't even know existed - I could tell you about 3 or 4 more.

Until someone outlines a clear vision for how this ought to be, and
until it gets implemented, I fear that this will continue to be a
mess. I don't want to sound like a mindless fan of OS X, but if you
check how things are done there, its just so enormously cleaner (and
simpler, and more powerful). Its not that GTK could not do this, but
the fact that there are so many existing mechanisms means that
replacing them with a single clean one would (a) break a lot of GTK
apps (b) be quite a lot of work.

Sorry this is not more useful in a practical sense. If you want
information on how we currently manage this sort of stuff in Ardour
(http://ardour.org/) please feel free to ask.

--p