Re: broken accelerator changes

[Thomas Leonard <tal00r ecs soton ac uk>]

On Sat, Mar 02, 2002 at 11:34:54AM +0100, Tim Janik wrote:

[ problems with unchangable accels ]

> - non-US users still need to change accels even with the new key hash,
>   as that only fixes some of the symptoms of locale dependant
>   accelerator setups. your own email on the key hash change has the
>   details on why we can't perform greedy fallback match attempts.
> - the key hash can't account for accel setups which don't hold due to
>   menu item/abbreviation translations.
> - application authors will not account for making their applications properly
>   deal with runtime accel changes, simply because they don't see and test
>   a feature that's there but not enabled.
> - some applications (the gimp, beast) will implement their own hackery to
>   enable runtime changable accels by default because their users need it
>   and are used to it. this leads to gtk+ applications behaving inconsistenly
>   and probably session/desktop wide settings to not take effect in some
>   applications.

I think you missed one important point: confusion for new users.
Currently (1.2), applications tend to offer fairly clean means (eg,
ROX-Filer has only one shortcut defined by default).

However, if they're not changable then people are going to send in feature
requests like 'Please allow Ctrl-X for delete', etc. Rather than explain
how to turn the feature on, most authors will probably give in and add a
new default. This will happen until every single menu entry has a
short-cut defined by default [1].

This makes the menus look cluttered and off-putting for new users, and
increases the chance that pressing a wrong key will activate some feature
(I thought a goal of the GNOME UI people was to *reduce* the number of
short-cuts?).

Doesn't affect us, of course (unless the filer is being run under GNOME),
so I'm not complaining, just pointing out what may happen...


[1] Alternatively, every user will end up turning the feature on just to
be able to set the one short-cut they actually need. Then we're back where
we started, except with more-annoyed users ;-)


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