KMail key binding and the User Interface Guidelines

[Robin Rosenberg]

Not sure if I should report this as a bug or not. 

For some time KMail has not obeyed the "standards" with regard to the common keys like arrow-up, down, Ctrl-A etc. In
most applications arrow up mens "focus on next item", in KMail it is "scroll down in mail". Ctrl-A means select all item, i KMail
it means select all messages, typing a letter focuses on the list item starting with that letter (in kmail its a combination
oa actions and selecting items).

Of course these are useful to some and people coming from inconsistent mail clients may not notice the inconsistency. I do notice. The
consistency in KDE's user interface is a big reason for me preferring KDE over Gnome (and GTK applications in general) I'm used to being 
able to navigate just about everything from the keyboard using  the "standard" conventions common in Windows and KDE and some other 
environments. Kmail breaks a lot.

I could subscribe to the idea that without a predefined focus some non-standard bindings could be used, but when I explicitly select a pane, by
clicking in it or using tab to shift focus to the next pane, things should work the same in all applications.

The "focus" is very unclear in KMail. If I use the arrow keys it appears that the messge has focus, but if I press Ctrl-A it appears that the message list has focus
pressing J (or something not prebound in Kmail) shifts focus on the first message box starting with the letter 'J'.  Pressing 'K' does not focus one the KDE-list folder

If I click on a message and press Ctrl-A, the whole message would be selected in any KDE application I can think of. Except KMail. 

Another thing is the +/- keys which is most apps mean open/close trees in lists. Again Kmail has it's own idea.

A very "similar" application is KNode, but keybindings are very different, but more consistent with the KDE User Interface Guidelines. 

It seems KDE is moving towards the ad-hoc key bindings of traditional unix apps, where every developer has his own standard.

Ofcourse, considering the alternatives, KMail is still my choice, but these are things that annoy me and are possibly very annoying to peoply who cannot choise their method
of interaction as easily. 

-- robin
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