Re: keyboard/focus annoyance after sorting in list view

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2009-03-06 at 08:43 +0100, John Keller wrote:
> 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 ;-) ).

It certainly may not be the way everyone expects a computer to behave,
but its the way other gtk+ apps does. And as these other apps look the
same people generally expect them to act the same too. Even if they
consider it wrong. :)

So, consider my comment being about changing the nautilus behavior to be
other than other apps. I don't have anything per-se against changing
details of gtk+ behaviour that will affect all apps.

> 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).

Really? Is this a global switch? How is it decided which elements are
allowed to be focused?

> 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).

This isn't a bad idea. Does any other app have this, and if so what
shortcut are they using?

It sort of goes with the split view too, where that key could be used to
switch between views.