Re: Default button in dialogs

[Jon K Hellan <hellan acm org>]

Michael Rogers <mrogers cs ucl ac uk> writes:

> Sorry if this has been covered before - I did a quick search of the 
> archives and didn't find anything.
> 
> One of the usability problems in Gnome that frequently trips me up is 
> setting the default button in dialogs to the "least dangerous" button 
> (usually Cancel) rather than the OK/Proceed/Apply button. This makes it 
> inconvenient to use dialogs from the keyboard, because there's often no 
> keyboard shortcut for the OK button, while the Cancel/Close button has 
> two shortcuts (Escape and Enter).

Least dangerous is a good principle, but only if there are dangerous
choices. "sort" without undo is probably dangerous, and exit without
saving. But printing isn't dangerous.
 
The programmer has to think, and not blindly accept the toolkit
default (usually Cancel).

> At the command line, Enter means "apply what I've just typed". I don't 
> see why this convention should be broken in Gnome, particularly as 
> Windows and MacOS have established the convention that Enter means "OK" 
> and Escape means "Cancel". So, could the style guide please reflect 
> this convention?

This is indeed the convention in Gnome, but it's not obeyed in too
many places. It doesn't "just work", the programmer has to program
it. HP's book "GTK/Gnome Application Development" tells how.

I think the default should probably be the other way round. It should
take an effort to make Enter *not* mean "OK".

Regards

Jon Kåre