Re: Questions (keyboard accels, drag/drop. translation)

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Bryan said:

> 6/09/02 "Martin Craig" <m craig graffiti net>
> >My app has a right-click popup menu but no menu bar. What keyboard
> >accelerator should I use to pop up the menu (F10?). Also what's
> >the easiest way to add an accelerator like this to a widget?

For popup menus, the recommended keybinding is Shift-F10.  You may want
to consult the last column in the GNOME Keyboard Navigation draft
recommendations:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/keynav/gtk_menus.html

> hi! option to always show Menu is good as some folks like to always know
> what can be done. & its much easier to only to do Alt+letter than
> Shift-F10+whatever. 

Regarding posting of menus, you should stick to the spec.  Consistency
is vital, particularly for vision-impaired users.  However it is good to
allow users to access the accelerator shortcuts via Alt-<letter>, as
Bryan suggests, and making these available on popup menus as well as the
more usual drop-down menus could be helpful.

> Also the Apps key seen on 90% of keyboards is really
> easy to use so making that key work is terrific help. 

We probably will want to reserve the Applications key for use by
assistive technologies, so I would not recommend using it for
application key bindings.  As it stands we have problems with
conflicting "meta" keys, applications, window managers, etc. already use
Shift, Alt, Control, and all the letter keys, arrow keys, and most
function keys.  Therefore it is very hard to find keys for use with
assistive technology that don't conflict with other uses, and I believe
that the 'application" and "menu" keys are our only real hope for these
applications, other than perhaps the numeric keypad - and of course
overriding the function of the numeric keypad is unfriendly for other
reasons.

> If Microsoft did
> introduce Apps key as advertising I get lots fun out of using it to get
> peak performance from Opera's browser! BTW Opera once had an easy to hide
> its Menu &  many folks obsessed on the problem so giving folks a Menu could
> mean more people will use your program

It's better to be consistent and use the keybindings recommendations in
the above document.  It is currently marked "draft" and is clearly a
work-in-progress, documenting the discrepancies between the current
GNOME behavior and the recommendations, etc. but we would hope that a
similar, simplified document will evolve out of this to answer the sort
of questions Martin raises.

Bryan raises some good points but unfortunately this is a business of
compromises, and applications which invent their own keybindings (even
if they are more convenient by some definition) create their own
problems.   I think that there may be some recommended keybindings that
are worth reconsidering, though it's perhaps too late to do anything
about this in the GNOME-2.X timeframe.  I have mentioned elsewhere that
there are other ways to accommodate users who need single-key shortcuts,
for instance via assisitive tecnologies that support macro-building and
key synthesis, etc.

regards,

Bill
 
> 
> Regards,
> Bryan Campbell
> 
> --> "It has been said the pebbles can't stop the avalanche, guess the
> pebbles didn't have access to the Web!"
> 
> 
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