On Ctrl+tab

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

Hi,

Hope everyone's doing fine.  It's been rather silent lately.  Not asking for 
flames, but lets get some discussion going :).

There have been many requests on various GNOME apps to switch tabs using 
ctrl-tab, or at least allow using ctrl-tab as an accelerator that can be used 
to switch tabs.  They have all been CLOSED WONTFIX consistently.  The reason 
for not doing that by default is that currently ctrl+tab is used to change 
focus when tab itself is consumed by a widget (text area, etc.  vte currently 
doesn't do that, but that's a separate bug.  Bug #602665).  Not allowing 
ctrl+tab as an accelerator is more delicate but essentially the same reason.

ChPe writes in bug 123994:

"No Gnome MDI application does this. In fact, this has been explicitly
rejected every time it's come up; see e.g. epiphany bug 122467 (+ some
non-marked dups), gnome-terminal in bug 123994, gedit bug 314646, empathy bug
586831, nautilus bug 597096."

To which a GNOME user replied:

"Well, if it keeps coming up and users are asking for it, maybe its the
GNOME/GTK policy that is wrong?"


As a user, I tend to agree with that sentiment.  While I understand the 
usefulness of ctrl+tab, it's not as handy and useful as rotating between tabs.
So, what can we do about it?

Cheers,
behdad