[Kdenlive-devel] Finally, a few keyboard shortcuts.

[Jason Wood]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Reinhard Amersberger [mailto:protux at web.de]
>
> What do you think about using the ESC-key to toggle between 
> the monitors?
> AVID use the ESC-key to activate the timeline, for example.

I'm not convinced that ESC would be the best key to pick, it doesn't feel as
if it fits with the KDE UI guidelines very well. But perhaps another key
would make sense - TAB seems to be the obvious one?

Incidentally, I have some thoughts on how to add keyboard editing commands
to the timeline itself. I'll mention it here, tell me what you think :

Have a keyboard "cursor" on the timeline. Like in a text edit session, this
can be moved forwards/backwards across the particular line, or it can be
moved up and down particular tracks. Pressing Ctrl-Left/Ctrl-Right moves you
to the end/beginning of the next clip. Selecting clips can be achieved via
the shift key - in other words, following the conventions of text editing.

Press a key, and you 'grab' either the selected clips, or the clip the
cursor is currently over. Move the cursor and the clips follow. Ctrl can
still be used to zoom around.

I need to put more thought into it before I decide if it's a useful way of
working.  My idea is to have a complete or almost-complete keyboard based
way of editing for poor laptop users like myself :-), any
thoughts/suggestions, or alternative ways to do it?

(Note, this isn't anywhere at the top of my TODO list, I'm just thinking
about it at the moment).
 
> Also it would be helpful to make it more distinct which 
> monitor is active.

Agreed. I am wondering about how best to achieve this - perhaps a red or
green border around the active monitor (surrounding both the screen and the
editing panels)? I think this needs to be made very obvious, and displayed
in a way that doesn't get confused with the LED light. Of course, if using
the monitors in tabbed mode it will be unnecessary - whichever window is
displayed should be the active window ;-)

> > - Pressing '[' and ']' sets the inpoints and outpoints on 
> the monitor. Since 
> > these are still non-functional, there is little use of 
> this, but it does hint 
> > that inpoints and outpoints will work in the non-to-distant 
> future ;-)
> 
> 
> This is easy to use with english keyboard layout, but not on 
> german keyboards, because germans have to press 'Alt GR + 8' 
> and 'ALT GR + 9' (I'm not sure, but 'Alt GR' must be the Meta 
> key in linux world, right?)
> Maybe it is better to use the I and O key just like most 
> other NLE's too?

I thought there might be some keyboard layout issues at some point :-) Ok, I
will change it to be I and O.

I've never been quite sure what the ALT GR key does :-)

> > - pressing space makes the active monitor play or pause. If 
> you press space to 
> > stop it and then press space again to play, it starts 
> playing from where it 
> > started playing the first time (i.e., not where it paused). 
> Whilst this may 
> > be the desired behaviour, it is an accident at the moment :-)
> 
> 
> Both functions are useful in my opinion.
> So there should be a pause and a stop action in the end.

Ok.

Cheers,
Jason