unity-design team mailing list archive

[Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 12, 2010, at 01:53 PM, David Siegel wrote:

>Drawing upon the discussion surrounding the bug "Underline under
>accelerator characters in buttons and menu bar should only show when Alt
>is pressed"*, Rich Jones suggested curbing the display of all keyboard
>shortcuts in menus. At first, I thought this was a ludicrous suggestion,
>but then I took a look at the mockups Rich attached to his bug report
>(https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bug/493762) and I
>found that the menus seemed significantly easier to use!

The menus do look nice with much less clutter, though I also worry about
discoverability.  There's a bug comment about keyboard-only users, which I
definitely am (when the app will let me!).

The shortcut display is all about discoverability.  When I know the bindings,
I'm never even going to look at the menu usually.  When I don't know the
binding, having them in the menu is great, and the clutter doesn't bother me
at all, because it contains exactly the information I'm looking for.

Note too that Gnome supports changing the shortcuts by hovering over the menu
item and hitting the key chord you want.  So if you get rid of the shortcuts
you still have to support this use case.

I'll also note that a large part of the problem is that the words "Shift" and
"Ctrl" are spelled out, with pluses in between.  Perhaps a cue can be taken
from OS X where there are easy to recognize icons for each modifier key.  On
OS X they shortcuts don't seem nearly as cluttering.  I guess it helps that
there typically are fewer of them (though changing them is the job of a
separate application, making it much less convenient).

-Barry

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