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

[Zak Jensen]

On 11/29/05, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Hamish Rodda wrote:
>
> > 1) Do people agree with the assessment that multiple shortcuts per action is
> > bad for usability?
>
> No. Having multiple shortcuts (being invisible to the user anyway) have no
> detrimental effect on usability. Supporting people's ingrained habits (like
> people used to the old cua set of cut, copy and paste) out of the box is
> very important.

Note: this has almost nothing to do with usability, but it should be
considered nonetheless.

It has additional benefits when attempting to "cover your bases" for
items which are not necessarially keyboard based, but which have to be
"hacked" onto the side of KDE.

The first example has already been presented: multimedia keyboards.

A (personal) example which represents power users a bit more: I have a
10 button mouse. I use an app (forget the name right now) to map the
events produced by pressing the extra buttons to keyboard presses (for
instance, the "forward" thumb-button to meta+F). I then use the extra
shortcuts to map that virtual keypress event to "forward". This would
not be possible without the extra keypress maps.

Now, where a tid bit of usability comes in: In theory, I could map
that mouse button to (say) ctrl+left. However, I don't want the mouse
button to be ctrl+left, as I would then have to re-map the button for
every other application. (Note: bad usability... as I am making the
mouse button modal, but my issue is customization-bent.... so it's all
about *my* usability ;) )

Granted, not every user will do this, but I know that it would be
highly annoying to the "power-user" base to only be able to define 1
action per button.

I hope this was understandable. I'll give additional examples if necessary.

> > 2) Will we need a way to support multiple shortcuts in KDE4?
>
> Sure.
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