Global Shortcuts

[Anders Lund]

On Monday 17 March 2008, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> Actually I expect _any_ user that starts an app he doesn't know to at
> least have a short look through the manual and those people that care
> for shortcuts probably also take a look into the shortcuts dialog simply
> because currently KDE completely lacks a proper place for listing and
> possibly printing them (I hope I can change that for 4.1 though).

Eh, what world do you live in? ;)

We (or at least I) start apps with an expectation that they can do or help us 
to do defined tasks, not because we have a world of time to spend learning 
new stuff. The manual is consulted if we can't figure out how to use the app 
to achieve our goals.

When kopete 'stole' CTRL + SHIFT + I, we got several bugs reported for Kate. 
No reporter consulted the Kopete manual, they looked in Kates, just to find 
that that shortcut indeed should activate the unindent action.

> BTW: I completely understand your points and in fact we're pretty much
> on the same page actually. You said that for apps like kwin or plasma
> which have no GUI anyway there would be a need to automatically enable
> their global shortcuts anyway.
>
> I do agree that a hint about global shortcuts would be nice on app
> startup and guess what, we have that already. Its called KTip ;) Just
> the app developer has to use it.

Do you have ktip enabled? I don't, it's usually the first thing I disable if 
an application provides it. I can't think of anybody I know who tends to keep 
those enabled. I may launch the tip dialog (help->tip of the day) if I want 
to learn a few things about an application, but again, I do not think I would 
find the right one when an action in one app fails reacting to a shortcut due 
to another app 'stealing' it.

I believe somthing at kdelibs level that would detect and warn about and offer 
to solve conflicts would be cool. It's just a question of designing it so 
well that it does not feel too intrusive to the user. 
-- 
Anders

www: http://www.alweb.dk
jabber: anderslund at jabber.dk