[rkward-devel] Better keybindings for "Run"

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Hi!

I've been wondering for some time why the current keybindings for "run
selection", "run line" and "run file" are so cumbersome. Shift+F[7-9]
are not exactly the easiest combinations to reach. And it's probably the
one people are using the most. :-)

Maybe there are historical reasons to this, but I find this choice
weird, since all other R GUIs I know use Ctrl+R, which is much simpler.
Function keys are far away on the keyboard and require you to press Fn
on Macs and current HP laptops. With Shift, this makes three keys to
press at the same time! (I've disabled this behavior on my laptop.)

I suggest to change these keybindings. The natural solution seems to be
Ctrl+R; this would run the current selection, if any, and the current
line if there is no selection (this is what SAS does with F3). Since
running the whole file is also useful, but used a little less often, I
suggest Ctrl+Shift+R.

This would have the advantage that you wouldn't run the whole file by
mistake just because you went a little too much on the right and hit F9
instead of F8. Pressing Shift is something you can't do by mistake. And
it would be much more natural, because when you have something selected,
you rarely want to run the line: you want to run the selection. You
wouldn't need to think (somewhat subconsciously) "I want to run the
selection, so I need to choose F7 and not F8". I see no drawbacks to
this approach.

BTW, the buttons and menus could be changed accordingly. Merging "Run
selection" and "Run line" would make some space available in the
toolbar, which would allow "Run block" and "CD to script directory" to
fit on screen when translated (in French, I couldn't manage to get the
whole bar to fit on my 1366px-wide screen, and for many languages other
than English it will be the case). Anyway, reducing the visual noise on
the main toolbar is always good for users.

What do you think?