Re: [Usability] Close buttons on instant-apply dialogs

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 10:24:21AM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Pete <pete setchell goodtechnology com> writes:
> > On Mon, 2002-01-07 at 01:05, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> > 
> > > As I see it there should be an accessible way to dismiss a window.
> > > IIRC Bill Haneman said that no Close button is no ironclad
> > > accessibility stopper. What about using Esc?
> > 
> > This would make a lot of vim and vi users *very* unhappy - Esc is used
> > to switch to command-mode in both of them.

Strange. I thought everyone hated modes.


> Esc already closes GTK 2 dialogs. (Though whether it means close or
> cancel is up to the app to get right.)

And ultimately up to the users to decipher.

  http://www.phys.lsu.edu/students/merchan/shots/gotta-love-this.png


> > Making the Gnome default short-cuts conflict with the most ubiquitous
> > and powerful unix editor is probably not a good plan ;-)
> 
> It should maybe be Ctrl-w instead of Escape, but that conflicts with
> Emacs, or Alt-F4 instead of Escape, but that conflicts with everyone's
> change-to-desktop-4 binding. ;-) You see the dilemma. ;-)

Neither Emacs nor vi is an editor that most people could use, although
emacs at least lets you just type most of the time. The greatest failing
of early versions of CUA was that it tried to compromise between tty
applications and graphical applications; even the most current version
still shows tty legacy bits.

Use of the Alt+F4 combo should have raised a stink when it first appeared.
Windows, CDE, and OS/2 all take this to mean Close Window.


> As Calum says, the focus widget gets keys before the dialog does, so
> if you have an edit control it will eat the key if there's a conflict.
> 
> Havoc

Cheers,
Greg Merchan