unity-design team mailing list archive

[David Siegel <david.siegel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-01-12 at 15:37 -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> 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!).

Barry, as a keyboard-heavy user, clearly removing keyboard shortcuts
categorically would be devastating, but how do you think the change to
only showing keyboard shortcuts for the highlighted menu entry would
affect you?

> 
> 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.

Very interesting. I just tried to assign a shortcut to Crop (which oddly
has no keyboard shortcut by default) and it did not work.

David

> 
> 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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