Re: On Ctrl+tab

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2009-11-22 at 22:11 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-11-22 at 20:15 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-11-23 at 01:51 +0000, Iain Nicol wrote:
> > > Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> > > 
> > > > On Sun, 2009-11-22 at 18:57 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > > > 
> > > >> 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?
> > > > 
> > > > Doesn't Ctrl + PageUp/PageDown accomplish the same thing? That's what I
> > > > use to switch from tab to tab.
> > > 
> > > Unfortunately, this isn't universal.  Gedit, for example, uses Ctrl + Alt 
> > > + PageUp/PageDown.
> > > 
> > > (And FWIW, I'd like to be able to use Ctrl+Alt.)
> > 
> > I'm pretty sure GtkNotebook implements Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown
> > automatically.  Is there some reason gedit overrides this?
> 
> I don't think it's explicitly overriding it, it's just that the
> innermost widget wins for key bindings; and in a TextView
> Ctrl-PageUp/PageDown are start-of-line and end-of-line.

Ah, I didn't realize that.  If Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown are valuable
for that, then I'd think we'd want to push to have them work in
other text editing widgets, like in Evolution, or in text fields
in a web form.  Or even in non-editable views, like a web page
with caret browsing enabled.

These sorts of things are often in GtkNotebooks, so conflicts
like in gedit are inevitable.  So that seems like a good reason
to use Ctrl+Tab instead for tab switching.

Of course, that would leave us with a big hole in our keyboard
navigation.  We need some sort of "super Tab" to break out of
widgets that consume Tab.

(On the other hand, I agree with Behdad that the Ctrl+PageUp
behavior on GtkTextView is kind of weird.)

--
Shaun