RE: shift=and-close-the-current-folder?

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

Havoc, is there any chance of Metacity surrendering Alt-Shift-Arrow (see 6.
below) to nautilus so we can have Mac-like keyboard navigation in Spatial
Nautilus?

Alt-Ctrl-Arrow (See 4. below) is also an option, I think, but Calum [2]
thinks that it would be confusing because Ctrl is used for accessibility
focus navigation (see 2 below).

I know that window manager afficionados like these things a lot, but I do
think that file management is a far more common operation than workspace
switching for the majority of users.

I suppose we could use Alt-WindowsKey (= Alt-Super in most cases) but I
don't like relying heavily on such a bizarre key.

> Murray Cumming wrote:
> It would be superb if we had Nautilus keyboard navigation 
> that's as usable as that in Mac Classic. That needs a 
> keyboard modifier for "and close the current one" that works 
> for both keyboard and mouse-click navigation. This is even 
> more important now that Nautilus is spatial. Here's my latest 
> attempt at a plan:
>   
> *** Keyboard navigation:
> 
> Here's my summary of what happens in GNOME 2.4 [1], in both 
> the list and tree views, when you try to use modifier keys 
> with the up/down arrow keys in nautilus:
> 
> Modifier(s)      Up Arrow              Down Arrow
> 
> 0. None         Move Selection up   Move Selection down 
> 1. Alt          Open parent           Open selected
>                   (Sometimes Alt-Down stops working)
> 
> 2. Ctrl         Move focus up        Move focus down
>                   (Focus is an accessibility thing)
> 3. Shift        Selection up         Selection down
>                   (Selects more than one item.
>                    Only works in ListView.)
> 4. Alt-Ctrl    Choose workspace    Choose workspace
>                    (Shows your metacity workspaces in a small 
> window in
>                    the middle of the screen and allows you to 
> choose one,
>                    even if you have only a horizontal arrangement of
>                    workspaces)
> 5. Shift-Ctrl Same as 2.
>                   (I think GTK+ is just ignoring the Shift, 
> so this is 
>                    still available to us.)
> 6. Alt-Shift  Switch workspace Switch workspace
>                   (Like 4, but without showing the choice window)

For 6. Peter Harvey pointed out that
"
Metacity actually uses that combination to take the currently active window
to a different workspace
"
 
> Personally, I think the problem is solved if we remove the 
> Metacity Alt-Shift key-combination. Then we would have 
> Alt-Down to open the folder
> Alt-Shift-Down to open the folder and close the current one. 
> Alt-Up to open the parent folder Alt-Shift-Up to open the 
> parent folder and close the current one.
> 
> People could still then use Alt-Ctrl to switch between 
> workspaces, with the nifty little workspace choice window. I 
> think it's greedy for metacity to take 2 key combinations for 
> what is basically the same feature. And they'll still have 
> Alt-Tab and Alt-Shift-Tab which do much the same thing.

So, this last paragraph is false, but I still don't think they are losing so
much. They can still use the window manager menu to "Move to Workspace X".
 
> *** Mouse-click Navigation:
> 
> It would be nice to use the same modifier as for window 
> navigation, to mean "and close the current folder". So I 
> suggest Shift-Double-Click = "open the folder and close the 
> current one".
> 
> *** So, are 
> there any objections to this plan:
> 1. 
> Persuade Havoc to remove the metacity Alt-Shift-Arrows 
> feature. 2. Implement Shift-Double-Click to open-and-close-current.
> 
> [1] Red Hat 9.
> 
> -- 
> Murray Cumming
> murrayc usa net
> www.murrayc.com

[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2002-May/msg00003.html