Re: [Usability] Using Control-Esc and Windows keys to access the start menu

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 22 Aug 2006, Shaun McCance wrote:

> Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:57:27 -0500
> From: Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Cc: Usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Using Control-Esc and Windows keys to access the
>     start menu
>
> On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 17:43 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > On Mon, 21 Aug 2006, Calum Benson wrote:
> >
> > > There's also a recent patch that will let you define multiple
> > > keybindings for the same function, so that distros who are so inclined
> > > can set both Alt+F1 and Ctrl-Esc to pop up the menu and keep everyone
> > > happy.
> > >
> > > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164831
> >
> > Excellent, good to know we have the underlying infrastructure to do
> > this cleanly but why leave it to the distributions?
> > (I need to figure out where exactly to patch but ...)
> >
> > The windows keybindings are fairly well known and I do not think
> > there would be much/any harm having the enabled by default, or at least
> > provide some way to enable this set of keybindings rather than expect
> > every user to configure each of them individually.
>
> The harm is that there are a finite number of key combinations

With Inkscape I have seen the downside of trying to have keyboard
combinations for absolutely everything

It makes it that much harder to choose a keybinding for a new frequently
used feature and to an extent it discourages developers from reorganising
step by step features into tools which would handle a whole task.
(compare inset/outset in Inkscape to the inset/ouset dialog in freehand)

> > Here's a list of the keybindings (and I refer to the Windows key the more
> > generic "Super" key)

> That's eight keyboard shortcuts being taken away
> from applications.

[...]

> Super hasn't had much formalized use.

I would not expect applications to be using the Super key.

> It's hard when Gnome gets run on systems that may have any combination
> of Control, Alt, Super, Hyper, and Meta.  (And I don't even know what
> the Command key on Mac keyboards looks like to GTK+.)

There used to be systems which used Alt instead Ctrl but their keybindings
were otherwise pretty much the same.  (I'm talking about both BeOS and an
old version of Netscape I was running on some odd version of Sun OS.)
This was at least part of the reason why Gnome made very little use of the
Alt key.

Gtk/X11 applications on OS X use the control key as they would normally.
I would expect Gtk Mac OS X to use the Apple/Command key everywhere
instead of Ctrl, as it has always been standard practice for applications
ported to Mac OS.

> I'd been experimenting with using Super to do emacs-like cursor movement
> commands in GTK+ text areas (Super+E for End, etc.)

Gnome has an emacs mode of text boxes and things like that doesn't it, so
I expect the keybindings you are proposing would not appear in the
standard defaults.  (Given the amount of trouble most users have with
Insert/Overwrite modes are a very bad default for beginners.)

> I actually have my right Windows key mapped to Compose, but that
> wouldn't be affected by any of this.

What I'm hoping to be able to do is create a file with the 8 or so windows
keybindings mentioned above and be able to enable them all in one go
rather than individually, and preferably enable them without clobbering
the standard keybindings.  (I'm thinking an accels_rc file, something like
windows_super_keys that I could drop into somewhere ~/.gnome2/accels/ and
add these extra keybindings without too much complication.)  Mainly I'm
thinking of this in terms of my experience with the GNU Image Manipulation
program which provides a set of photoshop like keybindings you can drop in
place.

> But if we add all these keybindings, then nobody
> else can use them for anything.  Users can hack
> their own systems, sure, but ISDs aren't going
> to tell all their users to disable such-and-such
> global keybinding just to use their application
> effectively.

ISDs should be using a lot of restraint when it comes to keybindings using
Alt or Super.  (Inkscape isn't and it is causing some users to get rather
annoyed about it.)

-- 
Alan