Ctrl+Y shortcut for redo

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 31 August 2006 14:12, Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Thursday 31 August 2006 20:33, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > Why would we want to loose a key for the KDE style just to
> > > accommodate ex Windows (and mac) users?
> >
> > the answer is in the question; as simon has discovered it is nice for
> > people who switch between the three desktops, particularly on a
> > day-to-day.
>
> Then the answer is, there is no point in losing it since these people are
> better off using the windows combos anyway if they want to avoid
> confusion.

so the recommended transitional path would be to use a shortcut system that 
clashes with several of our apps. the status quo (no Ctrl+Y at all) makes 
more sense than that.

> I really want to avoid a repeat of konqueror where very obscure keycombos
> have to be used for plugins like cervisia just because all the nice ones
> are used with arguments like Simons.

plugins and keycombos don't even belong in the same sentence for what should 
be obvious reasons, namely that there's no predictability as to availability 
at design time.

i also tend to wonder whether this says more about the design of konqi than 
key shortcuts ;)

that said, i agree it's not fun to have so few "spare keys" to pick from for 
custom application-specific actions. where do we find a balance?

> Start krita and see that there already are shortcut clashes. Its very
> annoying to see that 19 of the 26 normal letters are already taken by
> KDE. 

i'm counting 17 right now ... but maybe i'm miscounting or counting something 
different than you... still, 17 is a lot.

of those, 2 are specific to text completion which would imply a line edit type 
control has focus; they are also rather esoteric: substring vs text 
completion. i wonder how many people actually use that? and yes, i know, 
people who use it friggin' love it. they can use the UNIX scheme, perhaps. 
and leave the rest of the people alone with 2 more modifiers ;) or we could 
just say "hey, these only apply to line edits, and when those line edits have 
focus then it's expected that tasks associated with those shortcuts won't 
work" and reclaim those 2 for application use anyways.

now we're down to 15.

there are several niche ones like "add bookmark" and "go to line". those 
should be freely reusable by applications that don't provide bookmarks or a 
jump-to-line feature. that's 13, leaving 13 available.

if we add Ctrl-Y, that's 14 used and 12 available for usage. seems reasonable 
to me. how many items need Ctrl+SINGLE_KEY shortcuts in an app in addition to 
the common and standard actions?

> Reading back, I guess the most obvious solution is missed; both mac and
> win know about ctrl-shift-z, you say? (which makes a really simple to
> press triangle here), so all KDE using people can just get used to that
> on those platforms, right?

we could say this, yes. but if refugees from redmond are used to ctrl+y and 
it's fixable, that's a bit snarky on our part.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
Undulate Your Wantonness
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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