David Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Marc A. Lehmann wrote: >> On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 11:39:44PM +0200, David Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > I'm sure that ergonomy was considered for Photoshop when they >> > chose Ctrl-Shift-Z for Redo... I do think it's overstating our >> > importance somewhat to say that what's good for a large portion >> > of the rest of the world is not good for us. >> >> "Others do it" is never an argument, though. > > It's an argument, just not a very good one (on its own). "Others > do it, because it's been shown to be the best way" would be a > decent argument, for example (I'm not arguing this). > > In the current situation, I think it's reasonable to fit in with > what others do in the general case, which dynamic shortcuts > provide a way to revert to the old behaviour. When the others are > everyone using a Mac, plus people who come to the GIMP from KDE > or GNOME applications, and PhotoShop users, I think the benefits > of a familiar keybinding are self-evident.
Is familiarity an argument when what's "familiar" is *way* less comfortable than the less-familiar but better shortcut? IMHO needing <shift> to toggle between undo and redo is an absolute usability desaster. The reasons have been said earlier in this thread: repetitive undo/redo is a a common operation in graphics applications, unlike e.g. text editors. I completely follow the rationale of consistency but IMHO usability overweights it. > If you like, I'm arguing populism here. More people use > Ctrl-Shift-Z as redu than Ctrl-R. Therefore, until there is a very > good reason to change, we should do the same. In addition, a > considerable body of usability work reccommends this keymapping. Yes, and more applications are text editors or word processors or similar things where this absolutely makes sense. Is it our fault that the HIG guys only have GEdit in mind when they write down stuff? And btw, a considerable percentage of mails in this thread voted for ctrl+R, does this count less than questionable "consistency"? >> What you need are arguments in favour of Ctrl-Shift-Z, and the only ones >> that there are is "the HIG and other platforms use it, so people are >> probably used to it, making it easier for them to switch". > > Yes, that's about it. It's also that current GIMP users probably > benefit from having the same keybindings everywhere. There's > nothing that annoys me more than using emacs, getting back into > the emacs keybindings, and then using vim, and freezing the > terminal with C-x C-s. Of course, this is not like with like. But > I imagine that people who use both the gimp and photoshop have > dozens of little annoyances like these. I guess people will rather find it annoying to do complicated <shift> trick using three instead of two fingers. Have you ever looked what photoshop *really* does when pressing the undo shortcut several times? Following them when it comes to undo key bindings is the worst we could do... >> That is one aspect of usability. It doesn't have much to do with >> ergonomics, and as others already have said, Ctrl-R/Ctrl-Z is much more >> ergonomical than three-key-combinations. >> I think "two keys vs. three keys" is extremely obvious, too. >> So ergonomics is might have been considered, but it was certainly >> _dismissed_, as other, much more ergonomic combinations, are available. > > You have a point here. I think that what was chosen was the > consistency of Shift as negation. I think that's probably a goal > we could work towards. It certainly makes a lot of logical sense. > But then, so does having + to zoom in instead of =, and look how > many bug reports that's got us :) > >> > And the usability people have considerably more experience with this >> > than either of us :) >> >> usable != ergonomic, though. > > Fair enough. > >> And I think that gimp users have considerable more experience with using >> gimp than the usability people. > > If the GIMP were the only graphics application choosing this > keybinding I would agree. I guess that when in doubt, following > the crowd is a fairly safe bet (note this leaves open the > possibility of not following the crowd when not in doubt ;). I don't know about others' doubts, but I have no doubt that we should keep <ctrl>+R, since we are not talking about feature xy of application xy (how often do you use undo in your word processor), but we talk about the most-used shortcuts in the GIMP. Making them less accessible is no option IMHO. ciao, --mitch _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
