On 9/6/07, Nick Treleaven nick.treleaven@btinternet.com wrote:
Hi all, I think it's time for me to write up what I think are the important rules for default keybindings, following the Geany Philosophy (TM). These are in order of importance.
1.a) Avoid Window Manager shortcuts, especially Gnome. b) Avoid shortcuts that don't work on most keyboard layouts. 2. Make common things easy to do. 3. Use F-keys, PgUp, etc. to make more room for alpha-keybindings. 4. Add Shift to keybindings to do a related action. 5. Prefer Ctrl-Alt-{x} to Shift-Alt-{x]. 6. Avoid duplicate keys for the same thing. 7. Should be reasonably easy to remember.
While these aren't ideal for everyone, they should (hopefully) be a good set of rules. IMO functionality should be more important than grouping related things together.
Yes, I guess this last comment of yours is where our opinions really differ. I think that grouping leads to making them easier to get into your muscle memory. As in, one's fingers automatically reach for Shift-Alt when you know you're doing a selection operation... or the Alt key if you know you're going to manually hit a menu or some other GUI element. Like keybinding namespaces. It sounds like you and Enrico prefer the bindings to be more of a grouping of most-commonly-used (Ctrl-<key>, Shift-Ctrl-<key>), to less-commonly-used (Ctrl-Alt-<key>, F-keys) to least-commonly-used (Shift-Alt-<key>).
Anyhow, if that above list is on target, you may want to enshrine it in the Keybindings section of the Usage chapter of the manual.
Some possible clarifications:
- Use F-keys, PgUp, etc. to make more room for alpha-keybindings.
3. Use F-keys and navigation keys (PgUp, Home, etc.) to make more room for alphabetic keybindings.
(btw, I notice that Gnome uses Alt-Fkeys quite a bit.)
- Add Shift to keybindings to do a related action.
4. Add Shift to Ctrl-<x> keybindings to do a related action, or possibly an opposite action if there is an obvious opposite.
(Geany does this with [Shift-]Ctrl-G ... I think that's the only place Geany does this though...)
- Prefer Ctrl-Alt-{x} to Shift-Alt-{x].
Maybe also fit the F-keys in that sentence somewhere?
---John