Re: [HIG] [Fwd: f9 keybinding]

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Tue, 2002-10-01 at 03:43, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-10-01 at 01:18, Seth Nickell wrote:
> 
> > User-defining of function keys seems like a cool/desirable thing. If we
> > want that, we should say it, and generally push for it. We'd need a
> > standard way of assigning them, etc. It'd also probably mean dropping
> > some existing things that function keys might be commonly used for
> > (isn't save on one, or something  ??).
> 
> It could certainly cause a few problems, yes: currently F1 is used for
> menu/tooltip things, F8 cycles keyboard focus between splitter bars in
> the current context, and F10 is used for menu things.  These are all
> pretty much inter-desktop standards (apart from F8, perhaps, although
> this is what Java uses; I'm just not aware of any other toolkits that
> let you move splitter bars from the keyboard).
> 
> All the others are free though :)

I wonder if this is an all or nothing thing. Its simple enough to say to
the user "you can make any function key do whatever you want".... I
think its a lot more complex for the user (as well as less useful) to
have to know which function keys are bound by which applications, which
they can remap, that sort of thing. Following up on that, if we're not
going to have all the function keys (or some logical subset of them, say
the first six or the ones greater than F8 or something) be user
definable, I think they might as well be all up for grabs by apps.

-Seth