Re: metacity: removing alt-shift-up/down

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Fri, 2004-02-27 at 12:24, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 11:28:53 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > Havoc, is there any chance of changing the metacity keybindings defaults
> > to remove alt-shift-up/down? Here's the bug:
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129263
> > 
> > This will allow people to properly use keyboard navigation in nautilus
> > 2.6. For instance, alt-down opens the folder, but alt-shift-down opens
> > it and closes the current folder.
> 
> That seems like pretty twisted logic to me. You realise that if
> this change was made, Alt-Shift-Left/Right would still move windows
> between desktops but up/down wouldn't?

If the maintainer wants that, but I'd personally remove the
alt-shift-left/right as well. That's what the bug suggests.

>  And that you break UI backwards
> compatibility?

Of course, I am talking about changing something. UIs must change to
improve.

> Why exactly cannot Nautilus be changed? These are hardly intuitive
> keybindings for opening a folder anyway.

It's been discussed at _great_ length and the alternatives have been
fully explored on several mailing lists and in bugzilla and this has
been decided upon.

Alt-Down for "Open" in Nautilus was well established before GNOME 2.6.
GNOME 2.6 just adds Shift-Alt-Down to say "and close the current folder
too".

Keybindings are generally not intuitive. You don't need them to get
stuff done, but you can learn about them to get things done faster.

>  Currently "Enter" opens a new
> folder, which seems logical. What's wrong with Alt-Enter or Ctrl-Enter for
> Nautilus (which currently do exactly the same as enter does)?

The point is to use the arrow keys, moving the hands as little as
possible during navigation. It's a well established and loved Mac Finder
feature.
  
> > Yes, we know that this will piss off a small number of people and that
> > those people will complain loudly. That's the case with all window
> > manager changes. But the average user does not care about that stuff.
> 
> That seems like rather like a template excuse for any WM UI break
> regardless of the validity of the change. We wouldn't think of changing
> alt-tab between releases, right? Even though it could be argued that the
> average user always uses the window list and not alt-tab.
> 
> I'm not say the change shouldn't be made, I'm saying that sticking a
> blanket "average users don't care about this stuff" disclaimer on the end
> of reasoning for a breaking change isn't especially impressive.

The average user does not care about obscure window manager details. He
just uses the defaults, and doesn't even know about most of the default
window manager keybindings.

-- 
Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc murrayc com