Re: [Usability] Application-type keyboard shortcuts

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Bryan Clark wrote:

> Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 08:19:19 -0400
> From: Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>
> To: Aschwin van der Woude <aschwin van der woude movial fi>
> Cc: Gnome Usability List <usability gnome org>
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Application-type keyboard shortcuts
>
> On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 11:15 +0300, Aschwin van der Woude wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Since buying a new digital camera I have used Nautilus/eog/gthumb/gimp a
> > lot and I found out each of them have different keyboard-shortcuts.

It should be possible to get Nautilus EOG [2] and gthumb to use the same
keybindings as they are closely connected to Gnome.

The gimp is another question entirely.
The gimp is not a part of Gnome (according to the developers) and although
it is making efforts to follow the Gnome Guidelines they have been doing
things their own way for a long time and it would probably be very
difficult to convince them to change their default keybindings.
However the gimp does allow you to manually change keybindings, version
2.1.3 even had a seperate editor to make it easier to set keybindings.

An application as complex as the gimp has many more things that require a
keybinding so it is

> > Eog doesn't seem to have any, gthumb and Gimp have some overlap (e.g. 1
> > = original size), but for fit-to-window they have different shortcuts.
> >
> > It would be nice if such applications agree on a set of keyboard-
> > shortcuts. Would the HIG perhaps be a place to define keyboard-shortcuts
> > for different types of applications?

If the guidelines are overly specific it could causes problems.  I've
already had to try and convince people that the mnemonics used in the
examples in HIG are not necessarily the best choice but a general example
and not something the authors intended to etch in stone, but people take
these details very serious.

The guidelines need to be flexible, they are after all guidelines not hard
rules that we can emphatically say are always the right answer in any
situation.

It is best to encourage those applications to try to be consistant with
each other and offer helpful advice if we can.

> It actually does this already [1]. In the view section are shortcut keys
> that applications should be using for zooming and others.
>
> If an application isn't following these guidelines it's probably a bug
> in either the HIG being out of date or the application.


> [1] http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig_new/input-keyboard.html#shortcuts

Link to the HIG 2.0 version of that page
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/input-keyboard.html#shortcuts


Sincerely

Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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[2] EOG is used by Nautilus, perhaps you already knew that but it wasn't
clear from your punctutation.