Global Shortcuts

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 17.03.08 20:58:28, Anders Lund wrote:
> 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? ;)

An ideal one, luckily. Everythings perfect around here :)

> 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.

Actually I didn't say you should read the full manual, I just said that
you should take a brief look at it. And quite seriously for an
application that I've never used (and where I've never used a similar
app) I actually do that myself.

> 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.

Yes, apparently there's some buginess in the global shortcuts behaviour.
I completely agree that silently stealing the shortcut of another app is
_really_ bad, that needs a dialog. However I completely oppose the idea
of not allowing to enable global shortcuts via API in kdelibs.

> > 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.

Well, I usually browse one or two of the tips if I face a completely new
app. But that seldomly happens anyway, people use the apps they know
already.

> 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. 

I actually was under the impression that the very reason to have a kded
module for global shortcuts is so that you get notified when an apps
registers and activates a global shortcut thats already taken by another
app. If that doesn't happen its a serious design flaw/bug in the global
shortcuts manager.

Andreas

PS: I'm not using KDE4 as a desktop so I really haven't experienced
these things (besides the serious problems that existed before the 4.0
release wrt. kwin shortcuts)

-- 
You will be awarded a medal for disregarding safety in saving someone.