Re: Shortcuts (was: Accelerator and terminology guides?)

[Andrea Mankoski <andi eng sun com>]

Hello,

I'm another one of the HCI designers at Sun.  Prior to taking on the
assignment to GNOME, I worked on a number of other desktop projects at
Sun, including CDE.  (And before that I was lead UI designer for cc:Mail
at Lotus, and before that I did animated multimedia...)

It seems like the real problem we are facing WRT keybindings and
shortcuts is which audience are we trying to satisfy, and can we satisfy
both. CDE ran into the exact same question: Do we make it like Windows
to ease transition for new users coming to UNIX, or do we make it like
UNIX (emacs, vi, rmail, etc.) to keep consistency with the existing
"standards" on the underlying platform?

I'm sure you don't need to be told that this quickly becomes a matter of
religion, especially amongst the UNIX users. I've been privy to more
than one vi vs. emacs battle, so I know it only gets worse when we add
Windows standards into the fray.

We could answer this question most satisfactorily if we first have some
idea of our user population: how many are Windows or Mac users who
expect pc keybindings and how many are UNIX users. Obviously if we
answer that question today, the overwhelming majority are UNIX (read
Linux) users who will expect things to behave like emacs, vi, etc.

So what do we expect our future user population to look like? Probably
some mixture of both types of user,  plus a few complete novices who
will start computing with GNOME.  Will the mix be biased in one
direction? If we have our way, yes, computer users worldwide will
abandon Microsoft wholesale and take up GNOME instead. But realistically
it will probably be a slow ramp, with the percentage of Windows users
growing gradually. Given that there really is UNIX under the covers, and
the various UNIX tools are probably not going to evolve towards the
Windows keybindings, I would recommend that we compromise.

The Alt+ solution is a reasonable one, already proven successful in
Netscape. Perhaps the best compromise we can come to is to use existing
UNIX "standards", supplemented with Alt+ bindings based on the Windows
standards (Alt+C=copy, Alt+Z=undo, etc.) Users coming to GNOME from
Windows or Mac will need to learn to use Alt instead of Ctrl or Command,
not a huge chore. In cases where they are exposed to the emacs- or
vi-like bindings, they will be learning new shortcuts that will help
them in other UNIX applications should they ever need to run them.

Andi
.............................................
Andrea Mankoski            HCI Designer             Sun Microsystems
andi eng sun com
Menlo Park, CA USA