Re: keyboard/focus annoyance after sorting in list view

[John Keller <gnome johnkeller com>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-02-22 at 21:35 +0100, florian wrote:
>
> > imo the up/down key binding should be changed so that pressing up moves 
> > the selection in the file list up... and not the selection of a 
> > different widget in the gui.
>
> This is the general behaviour of the Gtk+ tree widget (and Gtk+ in
> general). When you click on the list view header you change focus to the
> header "widget". This means further key events go to that widget and not
> the list itself. For these widgets the arrow keys control changing the
> focus widget, so you can change focus to another widget.
>
> Changing this is imho a bad idea, as it breaks keyboard navigation of
> the GUI, so that you can't e.g. use it without a mouse. It also causes
> problems for accessibility.

I often get annoyed at the behavior caused by the keyboard navigation 
guidelines, even though I understand very well why it's there. (Also 
being told that it's the way I "expect" [as in "people expect", in 
another thread recently here] things to be is a bit annoying, but that's 
a different subject ;-) ).

The way it's implemented makes it difficult for people who *don't* want 
to use the keyboard to navigate everything. Why is it that it's all or 
nothing? Even Apple provides a switch for this (basically, on/off - with 
"off" allowing only certain elements to be focused by keyboard).

But maybe that's the GTK stack. There's also the application level. 
Forgive my ignorance if this already exists, but I think that at the 
very least Nautilus could give a keyboard shortcut that gives focus to 
the file list frame, no matter where the focus is elsewhere in the 
window. The way things are, it requires juggling the mouse and the 
keyboard (or counting keystrokes/monitoring the screen closely when 
using keyboard only).

- John