[Redux] Re: [Usability]sft+ctl+w v. ctl+q

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu>]

Forgive me but to avoid unnecessary flooding of the mailing list I'm
going to reply to a bunch of different people at once in this email.


On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 19:37, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> Well, they are two different options, depending on point of view : 
> ctrl+q is Quit, shft+ctrl+w is Close All Windows.
> 

And there both wrong. MPT has long held that Quit in mozilla was an
overly dangerous operation since it made it way too easy to accidentally
close all open browsers (you can select file=> quit from the bookmarks
window and it literally quits mozilla, huh?). This is compounded by the
fact that quit is usually the last menu item in the file menu making it
rather easy to target.

The origin of the quit item is most likely the original macos. The point
of the menu entry was to provide a quick way to free memory. Quit is
really a rather unneeded menu item on the computers which we can expect
gnome to be used on. I very comfortably run it on 450 mhz machine with
all the bells and whistles. Quit needs to be killed off (and i should
mention that in the draft hig there is mention of this).

Close All Windows is an even worst menu entry though, since it doesn't
actually do the operation it claims to perform, it only closes a subset
of the open windows, those which belong to binary nautilus. (i know i'm
being pendatic here). The term window is incredibly vague, and is really
more of an implementation detail imho.


On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 22:29, Wesley Leggette wrote: 
> Sometimes it doesn't really make much sense to have CTRL+SHFT+W when you
> could have CTRL+Q, but it doesn't seem to hurt things. I think the
> difference is clear, and sometimes users will want to be satisfied that
> they are closing the entire application. 
> 
> Plus, this has utility in Mac OS X, where closing all windows does not
> often (and in fact rarely) exit the application. Therefore, it's
> probably worth keeping both close all windows and quit application. 

This only seemingly makes sense on the mac because of its global menu
bar. In gnome close all windows would be the equivalent of quit always
(with the one exception of nautilus). But why do we need to expose the
idea of processes (apps) to the user. Of course I think both entries are
wrong.

On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 19:54, Luis Villa wrote:
>Well, after a spirited office argument... from a more 
> document-centric-POV, why not ctl+w only everywhere? This gets messy,
> though, for experienced users. 
> 
> thinking aloud myself, too.
> 
> FWIW, I think fixing this 'only' in epiphany/galeon/nautilus sucks- the
> UI team should probably figure this out more clearly and settle it
> everywhere. But that may be a different battle. :)

Switching to only ctrl+W is the ultimately the goal imho. However last
year when MPT and greg brought it up, there was storm of controversy
about the idea. You can read the hig archives from around 0October 2001.
Fixing this in only a few apps right now does suck but as i mentioned
before there is a comment related to this topic in the hig. Also fixing
this in a few apps first gives us a test bed on which to base a final
decision to kill off the quit menu item.

Given all the above, the issue Marco and I are having in relation to
epiphany is related to mdi in the ui. Specifically the close and new
menu items and acceptable keyboard shortcuts as well as behavior. (this
issue has reminded both of us how much we hate tabs, they make stuff so
messy.) It would be nice to have a hig recommendation for interaction in
mdi apps (though i hope there is a big sign saying "only use them if you
are a web browser or terminal"). Oh and I should mention that there is
an open bug in bugzilla as well.

dave :)