Style guide decision needed (was: [Kopete-devel] Bug#40938: behaviour change request)

[Martijn Klingens]

On Sunday 28 April 2002 14:31, Antonio Larrosa Jiménez wrote:
> > Wow... That's a long time ago then :-) I hacked the ctrl-enter into the
> > MSN dialog even before Kopete moved from SoruceForge to KDE CVS, so
> > apparently you're a long-time user :P
>
> I'm afraid I'm not, I just used it since it moved to kde cvs, but I never
> found Ctrl-Enter until someone said it in this thread (again, imagine when
> will the average user find it).

1. Make it a proper KAction, so you have the 'customize key bindings' option
2. Tip of the day

Both are fairly common practice in many other KDE apps as well, especially the 
first. Or did you know about ctrl-alt-n to start a new konsole session, 
ctrl-alt-s to rename one and ctrl-shift-arrow to move them in Konsole's 
session list? I bet not. And meta-| to vertically maximize? Heck, even 
alt-f4/alt-esc is a key binding you have to find somewhere. My mom uses the 
mouse for stuff like this, not the keyboard. I somehow doubt she'll try enter 
if there's a send button. Maybe by accident, but not likely on purpose.

> > That's the single true argument against it for MSN users. ICQ users and
> > KMail users are already used to the key, so they will find out. For MSN
>
> I thought Ctrl-Enter was bound to "send mail now". I never thought
> Ctrl-Enter was a way to submit what I wrote since a mail is much different
> than a sentence (which is what I send to the people I talk to, as opposed
> to people I write to, just sentences, in separate lines).

I send a _message_. After all it's instant messaging, not instant lining. And 
a message more often than not consists of multiple lines, separated by a 
newline.

> It's not only about MS's client (which I never used so I don't know how it
> works), but about intuition. In a shell, Enter executes (submits) the line
> that you wrote while you have to do something different (writing \ at eol)
> to execute (submit) multiple lines at once. Of course, we shouldn't force
> the user to write \ to provide multi line edits, but I think providing an
> option to use single line edits (by default) or multilineedits would be
> nice.

Which assumes you always (or at least mostly) send a single line of data, 
which is hardly the case for me.

> IMHO kopete should always support them on "receive", but only to send them
> when the appropiate option is set (_and_ show a message box when the user
> checks the checkbox which says "In order to provide multi line messages,
> you have to press Ctrl-Enter to submit your message while Enter just adds
> a new line" ).

And why do you think even MS' own client (which is the most dumbed down of 
MSN, Trillian, ICQ, Yahoo, Kopete, ... ) supports ONLY a multiline edit? 
Because everyone uses that feature. Difference is that MS uses shift-enter 
for newline, just like in MS Word, where shift-enter is a line break, as 
opposed to a paragraph break. That leaves enter available for send.

Martijn