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

[Antonio Larrosa Jiménez]

El Sunday 28 April 2002 16:03, Martijn Klingens escribió:
> 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,

We're not talking about other applications, but about kopete.

> 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.

But they're not essential to use konsole while Ctrl-Enter will be if you 
want to keep kopete usable.

> And meta-| to vertically
> maximize? Heck, even alt-f4/alt-esc is a key binding you have to find
> somewhere.

Yes, alt-f4 is nicely written at the right of the menu option "close" which 
I have to click to close my window. Where will Ctrl-Enter be written ?

> My mom uses the mouse for stuff like this, not the keyboard.

Many people will do the same. But come on, how many windows does she/you 
close in a day ? Will you compare that to the key binding to submit some 
text in a IM application ? (where you write at least 3 or 4 lines each 
minute).

> > > 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.
>

And? I'm not saying that multilineedit should be forbidden.

> > 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 their users don't care about multilineedits (which, believe it or 
not, is a "power user" feature that the average user won't use) and 
because they support both multilineedit _and_ Enter sends text. But still 
they provide a multilineedit for you to use multi line messages.

> 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.

My proposal involved both, being consistant _and_ easy to use by using an 
option that explicitly says the kind of widget kopete would use.

Ok, if you prefer consistency with LICQ over easy of use then do what you 
want. But MS (and IRC) choose easy of use (Enter submits) and that's for a 
reason (ok, IRC doesn't support multiple line messages anyway, but, come 
on, have you ever really needed them in IRC? And most important, do you 
think more than 5% of our users will ever need it? )

Greetings,

--
Antonio Larrosa Jimenez
KDE Core developer  - larrosa at kde.org
http://devel-home.kde.org/~larrosa/
KDE - The development framework of the future, today.