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

[kevin lyda <kevin suberic net>]

On Thu, Aug 24, 2000 at 01:10:22PM -0400, Liam Quin wrote:
> This is the Xt solution -- an Xt application is supposed to use
> "translations" to map events to actions, with a config file that
> says things like
> Meta<Key>Q: quit(no-save)
> Meta<Key>q: quit(confirm-save)
> Ctrl<Key>u: goto-url(selection)
> Ctrl<Button>1: remove-files("~/*")
> 
> It's a real mess to work with, but also quite powerful;
> see the XTerm.ad file, particularly the one Sun ships with OpenWindows,
> for some good examples (Sun's shows how to implement copy and paste
> keys as well as the standard X middle-mouse stuff).

i'm not a gui developer, but i have been using x for over 10 years.
and there's a lot of things in x that are great ideas - iff someone
would come up with real config utils for them.  things like the xauth,
xset and xrdb are ugly, no they're fugly.  but if someone would take
the functionality within them and build *real* config tools with them
(instead of reinventing the wheel) i think things would move a good bit
quicker and my memory usage would go down...

as for the .ad files they're close.  obviously it's ridiculous to
have people edit each apps for each apps resources, and even making
a config tool to do that is silly.

i guess what i'm saying is to create a mapping in some part of gnome
(preferrably in the x server or in some corba accessible place) that maps
a generic concept to a key.  that way you can change the key-theme in a
simple manner and affect every app.  and if i want command-w (on a peecee
that's alt, not ctrl) to close a window i most certainly don't expect
alt-w to wipe-file in my wp.  that's why i don't expect much overlap -
the concept should always override the unusual case.

with this type of mapping i could easily see a person starting their
first gnome session where it asks some questions about the user.  one of
them could be "what system are you used to?" and the answer could be
used to configure the initial wm-theme, gtk-theme, key-theme, focus
policy, etc.  once the session starts the user would have a system
familiar to them - and the loud "keep the evil micro users away from
my holy unix box" folks would feel safe in that they could have their
own set of key-bindings.  the anti-social theme: alt-q for open-doc,
alt-s for quit, etc...

kevin

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