[Kstars-devel] more keyboard shortcuts

[Jason Harris]

Hello,

I was using KStars last night up at the 60-inch telescope on Mount 
Lemmon, near Tucson.  Some colleagues and I were hosting about a dozen 
high school students and their teachers for a night of eyepiece 
observing with the 5-foot wide light bucket :).  My favorite target of 
the night: NGC 7009.  Wow.  It looked almost exactly like the "KPNO 
AOP" image of it linked in KStars (except for the two red splotches, 
which I didn't see).

Anyway, we weren't using KStars for telescope control, just to find good 
objects for observing.  While using it this way, I realized how 
inefficient it is to get at the Details window of an object.  I would 
typically do the following:

Open Find dialog.  Type object name.  Center on object.  Position cursor 
on centered object.  Right-click, select "Details".

I'd like to add a keystroke to make this kind of operation faster.  My 
idea is to use the "D" key to open the Details window of the centered 
object.  But maybe it should open the details of the *clicked* object 
instead, or even the object which currently has a temporary label 
attached.  Which makes the most sense?  We could also use modifiers 
such as Alt+D to specify alternative selections.  Similarly, the "L" 
key could be used to toggle the user label on the 
centered/clicked/hovered object, "T" could be used to toggle a trail 
(for solar system bodies), and "O" could be used to add the object to 
the current observing list (once we have that tool in place).

Now that I write this out, I think that using the Clicked object makes 
the most sense, especially since this is how the Angular Ruler tool 
already works.  So maybe the key itself to operate on the Clicked 
object, and Alt+Key to operate on the Centered object.  What do you 
guys think?

Jason

PS- speaking of keystrokes, I guess the KDE standard is to make the keys 
user-definable, so we should look into doing that as well...

-- 
KStars: A KDE Planetarium
http://edu.kde.org/kstars