unity-design team mailing list archive

[Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 12, 2010, at 02:50 PM, David Siegel wrote:

>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?

It would be less convenient, because right now all I have to do is open the
top-level menu and I can see all the shortcuts for the commands under that
menu.

I just realized there's another important use case that would be lost:
searching for the reverse mapping.  Say I want to know what Ctrl-K is bound
to.  It's not entirely convenient right now if say that shortcut is in a
submenu, but with this feature enabled, I'd really have to do a lot of hunting
to find the reverse mapping.

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

Y'know, I'm wondering if this isn't a feature of Claws specifically.  That's
where I've used it most often (because I /live/ in my mail client ;).  I could
have sworn there was a magic Gnome configuration variable somewhere that
enabled this across the desktop, but it's not in the obvious places, e.g.
System->Preferences->Keyboard and System->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts.

Claws has Configuration->Preferences->Other->Miscellaneous->Enable
customizable keyboard shortcuts, so that must be what I was thinking about.
It's pretty darn cool and it would be nice as a general Gnome facility.

Thinking about this a bit more though, since keyboard shortcut displays are
all about discoverability (in both directions), I wouldn't at all mind it if
they were replaced in the menu by a separate configuration panel that all
apps would have.  Something like Keyboard Shortcuts but for a specific
application.  That would actually improve current matters where you wouldn't
have to hunt for any of the bindings, you'd see them all in one listing and
could edit, add, or delete bindings in one place.  Sort of like what OS X has
in its global System Preferences pane.

-Barry

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