Re: Gnome key bindings (was Re: gnome keys sucks)

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

>The only trouble is that I assume these must be Windows bindings,
>cos they look pretty weird to me. And Binding anything to ^S is just
>asking for trouble. Wait until someone hits that in gnome-terminal :)
>(The mutt-users list has had "I tried to rebind this macro to ^S
>and it hangs mutt" more than once as a Really Serious Bug.) Or would
>it actually take over and do 'save' even if you hit ^S in gnome-terminal?

Well in most cases I don't think we're talking about command-line apps. 
And the developer or the user can always use other keybindings - I'm only 
talking about providing defaults so that users who don't care about 
configurability can have apps that Just Work.

>And ^Q is my reflex when I think I accidentally _did_ ^S. I would
>be exceedingly irked by discovering that it quits the program before
>I have undone whatever idiocy I just performed. 

Don't worry about that. If ^S locked the terminal, ^Q will unlock it. If 
^S didn't lock the terminal, you won't need to hit ^Q.  :)

>But I think that you're 
>going to irritate an awful lot of us who have never used Windows if
>you use these. There's whole bunches of (alleged) defaults for keybindings
>and control characters. The Netscape.ad file is full of comments on
>them :) Bash comes with two (three?) sets, for a start :) 

Yeah - and isn't it a pain in the a***? Wouldn't you rather have the same 
keybindings in every GUI app? Windows' standard keybindings for select, 
cut, paste and copy (Shift+move, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) have probably 
saved me hours of tedious mousework.

It doesn't really matter what keybindings we use; the important thing is 
that they're consistent. And if they're consistent with KDE apps as well, 
so much the better.

>I wonder where they'd get implemented, too? Would these be another
>thing that gconf would have to look after? Since I imagine that if
>you change something, you want it to get updated immediately across
>all your Gnome applications?

I suppose that's possible. The solution I had in mind was just to add 
default keybindings to those apps that didn't have them, and encourage 
those apps that already had defaults to use the same defaults. A GConf 
solution would require more work and more thought (you'd have to consider 
every situation where the defaults *might* cause a problem, rather than 
considering each app individually), but it would have the advantage of a 
single place to reconfigure all your apps, I suppose.


Michael