Re: [Usability] the emacs keyboard shortcut issue

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 12:45 +0200, Sunnan wrote:
> 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.

Control+letter shortcuts are a scarce commodity, they shouldn't be used
for something arrow keys already do. Even many Emacs users (such as
myself) don't use those over the arrow keys.

This is also an area where we can get easy familiarity to Windows users.

> 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.)

We can't rely on such a key existing since we don't sell hardware,
though.

> 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.

Can't do that because Alt is standard for access keys. (The underlined
letters in labels are used with Alt)

Grab the keybindings table and start trying to make changes, note how
changing one keynav aspect will virtually always break another one,
since we're using nearly all the keys for something. So you change one
thing and break another thing and have to break another thing to fix
that, and so forth.

App authors really need stability in this table, too, or they can't
choose good nonconflicting bindings for their app.

Havoc