KAction port: do we need to support multiple shortcuts per action?

Thomas Zander zander at kde.org
Tue Nov 29 16:44:33 GMT 2005


Thanks for the clarification; I kind of expected there to be a mixup since 
I (knowing a bit or two about usability) have a really hard time coming 
up with reasons of why accessing the same thing in two different, 
non-conflicting manners is a usability issue.

Maybe the trolls found some reasons that I can't think of, but I can think 
of a dozen reasons why having 2 shortcuts leading to the same action (or 
even 4, as there apparently are) is usefull for usability.
Think of things like 'ctrl-=' and 'ctrl-+' being used to allow a logical 
key for font-enlargement but do not force the user to use shift.

I'd say that KDE4 should indeed try to keep multiple shortcuts per action.

On Tuesday 29 November 2005 17:02, Hamish Rodda wrote:
> On Wednesday 30 November 2005 02:52, Thomas Zander wrote:
> > Could you explain more clearly what 'multiple shortcuts' is?
> >
> > I can imagine 2 things;
> > * Having more then one complete shortcut per action.
>
> This is what I meant.  In KDE, this is provided by KShortcut, which can
> have up to 4 separate key sequences (although it seems only 2 are
> supported by the config gui).  In KDE3, KAction allows any of the
> sequences to activate the same action.  If we were to use QAction as a
> base for KAction in KDE4, to keep this feature we (or Trolltech) would
> have to add multiple sequence support.
>
> > * Having to press multiple keysequences per shortcut. (emacs style)
>
> Key sequences are supported (by QKeySequence).

-- 
Thomas Zander
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