Hi, I have been thinking about making Evolution easy to use from the keyboard. I think the basic strategy should be try to move as many commands as possible into the menu, and then allow Galeon-style binding using the menu.
Just in case no one knows what I am talking about, in Galeon you can
rebind any menu command simply by putting the mouse pointer over that
menu (or otherwise navigating to it) and then hitting the key you want
to active that command. Besides making it easy to assign keybindings,
it also has the big benefit that it is easy to get a list of which
commands can be bound (just browse the menus) and it is easy to
recollect what the binding for a given command is, because it is listed
right on the menu.
Once this is done, there should be folder navigation options added
in either in the Actions menu (because that's where message navigation
options are) or in the File menu (because that's where "Go to Folder"
currently is). The navigation options should at least include
Next/Previous Folder and Next/Previous Folder with Unread Messages.
Also, a new shortcut top-level menu should be added, which
automatically corresponds to the items in the Shortcut bar. The default
keyboard accellerators for these should just be 1-10 and then A-Z,
allowing the first 36 shortcuts to be keyboard accessable.
This would take care of most of the problem I think, but there would
still be a few remaining issues. For instance, when there is no message
selected "Previous Message" should select the last message in the
current folder. Also the Y/N/C menu really needs a shortcut (see bugs
at:
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17933
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=25962
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=27632
) but I have been told that this is not an evolution problem (see last
bug).
Anyway, I'd be interested in opinions on whether this is the right
way to go about doing things. I'm not sure I'll have time to implement
this, since I'm unfamiliar with gnome programming, although I do have a
big incentive since I really like Evolution and its VFolders, but it is
currently not nearly as easy to use as, say, Mutt. (In fact, recent
versions seem to be getting worse - in 1.1.0.99 there doesn't seem to be
keybord shortcut for Next/Previous Message!)
Thanks for any input.
--
Ben Escoto
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