Re: Review of accelerator changes

[Thomas Leonard <tal00r ecs soton ac uk>]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2001 at 01:20:43PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I guess we can turn dynamic-accel-changing off by default in Red Hat
> and Solaris and Ximian and so on, whatever wrong thing GTK does
> upstream. But I'd rather all GTK users avoided this possible source of
> confusion. It's blatantly a bad idea from a usability standpoint - I
> doubt you could get a single one of the experienced UI people we have
> in GNOME to defend it.

But, Gtk+ isn't only used in GNOME applications. How about this:

- Have the feature turned ON by default in Gtk+.

- Have gnome_init() turn it OFF (possibly as a config option from GNOME's
  control centre, etc).

If you're not trying to mimick Windows, I think the current scheme is
*excellent* from a UI standpoint -- fast and easy to rememeber. I was
delighted, not confused, when I found it (by accidentally pressing a key
while a menu was open).

I maintain a file manager which has often been described as easy-to-use,
and the only problems I've had in the past have been people not finding
the feature at all. Since adding a large button[1] in the Options window
telling people what to do there have been no problems at all.

So really, you just need to make people more aware of this feature, not
turn it off. Maybe even get GNOME to display a big message box the first
time users bind a key to a menu explaining what happened (although I think
it's usually obvious).

[1] Putting a message directly in the window didn't work. People trying to
    change the bindings were looking for something to click on, not a
    message. Replacing it with a button which displayed the same message
    stopped the questions coming :-)


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r ecs soton ac uk		tal197 users sourceforge net