n+1st report about arrow keys in krunner

[Jacopo De Simoi]

OK, this morning I tried some quick hacks to see how this looks in practice and I have a few comments already:

1) binding focus of the first item with focus of the Combobox feels really natural so I'd commit to trunk as soon as I clean up the code.

2) using the down arrow to go down the result list directly from the combobox is also quite ok, it works and feels very natural for the single runner mode (since you have no history there). However there are a few issues which I encountered playing around with it in "regular" mode
  * as far as I can tell KHistoryCombobox gives no clue about wheter text has been entered by the user or has been selected from the history. This makes detecting "pressing Down without any further entry in the history" quite complicated in practice (unless we are willing to subclass the historycombobox or change the libs).
  * suppose there is a bunch of results and the user presses down several times; then the user wants to come back to the combobox and presses up several+1 times by accident.. suddenly the previous element in history is selected, results are changed, the user is now very confused.

A solution would be to act "symmetrically", i.e. to go back in history if and only if the down key has *not* been used to scroll down the list.
Con: adding further conditions may lead to rather non-intuitive behavior for a user which needs both features...

Another solution would be to change the shortcuts for the history handling (e.g. add a modifier)
Con: krunner should be thought as a minicli, and up/down in a minicli are supposed to handle history

Let me know your opinions 

__J

P.S.
Sorry if the code is not yet ready for trunk, I had only time to try some chainsaw patching here and there; in any case I feel it's constructive to post my impressions here and hope for some smart feedback. Of course I can attach a patch if you're willing to try it out on your local copy.

> Am Samstag 27 Februar 2010 23:09:57 schrieb Jacopo De Simoi:
> > If (and only if) pressing Down without any further entry in the history,
> > then it could move the focus to the first entry in the list.
> I would change to: If (and only if) pressing Down without any further entry in 
> the history AND the Up key has not been used in this selection session.
> 
> If a user just presses down it can be expected he wants to use the list. If he 
> used the up key before pressing the down key, he wants to browse the history. 
> So if he reaches the end of the history list again, we can expect that he 
> still wants to browse the history and not the list.
> 
> (Oh and thanks for the hint with the history browsing. Did not know about it - 
> very useful feature ;-)
>