[Usability] the emacs keyboard shortcut issue
- From: Sunnan <sunnan handgranat org>
- To: usability gnome org
- Subject: [Usability] the emacs keyboard shortcut issue
- Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 12:45:56 +0200
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
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