Keyboard drag-and-drop? [was: Re: GnomeURIEntry]

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 12:40, Xavier Bestel wrote:

> Bad URL. Either it's
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/keyboardnav.html 

Yes, thanks Xavier.  That's the one.

> > Completion is great, but TAB is a very problematic choice.
> > 
> > Also note that any operation such as drag-and-drop, which use the mouse,
> > need keyboard equivalents.
> 
> About drag-and-drop, one thing I miss really (from the Amiga days) is to
> be able to press right-mouse-button to cancel it. Having to reach the
> keyboard to press ESC is a pain.

On a related topic, one area where we haven't really proposed a keynav
solution yet is drag-and-drop from the keyboard. 

At first that may seem contradictory, since drag-and-drop is a "pointer"
based concept.  But the current situation requires applications to
provide "duplicate" equivalents for drag sources and drop targets, for
accessibility.  

I wonder if it would be possible to provide a global keybinding for
"StartDrag" and another for "InitiateDrop" instead (we already have Esc
for "StopDrag").  As long as other keyboard navigation through focusable
objects and from window-to-window still worked, one could TAB to a
drag-source, initiate "Drag", TAB to a drop-target, then "Drop".  It
would take the burden of providing alternate gestures from the
application, and only require that drag sources and drop targets be
keyboard focussable.

It's not obvious whether this would belong in Gtk+ or the window
manager, but I believe it would be implementable from the window
manager, which might be the better choice since we try to keep the
toolkit from doing global keybindings/keygrabs.

regards,

-Bill