[Usability] the emacs keyboard shortcut issue

[Sunnan <sunnan handgranat org>]

Mmm, hi. It's me again.

I've been thinking for a while on how Emacs keyboard shortcuts work in
gtk/gnome text-editing fields.

They're so often overridden! While only a few apps (like Sound-Juicer)
dare mess with basics like C-a and C-d (since the HIG says not to), it
seems very common to override C-f, C-b, C-p and C-n. I don't know how
many times I've popped up a "Find" or "Print" dialog by mistake.

I've tried out Mac OS X (which overall is kinda crackrock IMVHO) a
couple of times, and this is one thing they do right; all application
shortcuts use the command key for shortcuts, while ctrl is reserved
for emacs stuff in text input fields. (They even implement C-t,
transpose characters.)

They're doing better than Gnome in that aspect, and the G in Gnome is
supposed to stand for GNU.

In many old Unix apps, before the "windowsication" that began with
KDE/Gnome, Alt was often used as a shortcut prefix key. (C.f. Netscape
4.x) Reverting to that would be one possible solution.

Here is where this is mentioned in the HIG:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/input-keyboard.html#shortcuts

Best wishes,
Sunnan