[Geany] default keybindings, revisited

[John Gabriele]

On 8/30/07, Nick Treleaven <nick.treleaven at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I noticed in the Balsa email client they used Ctrl-Alt-F for one
> shortcut - are there any problems with using Ctrl-Alt-[a-z0-9]? I know
> that Ctrl-Alt-F[1-12] are taken for consoles. If there aren't any
> important conflicts with window managers, perhaps we should use Ctrl-
> Alt instead of Alt-Shift for some bindings - Alt-Shift seems more
> difficult to hold down because they are diagonally separated.
>

It seems to me that GUI programs usually use the Shift key, with
either Ctrl or Alt, whereas terminal-based programs only use the Shift
key to reach various non-alphanumeric symbols.

For example, Emacs most often uses pairs of keys to do complimentary
features (like Ctrl-S and Ctrl-R for forward and reverse search), and
then augments them using the Alt key (here, for example, Ctrl-Alt-S
and Ctrl-Alt-R for forward and reverse *regex* search).

Using only Ctrl-foo and Ctrl-Alt-foo key combos is pretty
self-consistent (note, Emacs also uses Alt-foo keys, which for Geany
are only used for manipulating GUI elements). And it's pretty easy to
remember too, since you never have to consider, "was that capital or
lowercase?"

Using Shift along with various Ctrl-foo and Alt-foo keys is also
pretty self-consistent. Though, one problem I have is, every time I
try to hit Shift-Ctrl-r, I keep getting Ctrl-R instead! ;)

If you start having Ctrl-Alt-foo keys in Geany, you begin to get a lot
of keys to remember ("Can't remember that key combo. Was it Ctrl-L?
Shift-Ctrl-L? Shift-Alt-L? Ctrl-Alt-L? How about Shift-Ctrl-Alt-L?").

---John