First of all, happy new year to all!
I'm one of those users who like efficient interfaces, use the keyboard very
heavily, touch the mouse only when necessary, but still love GUIs and menus
that ideally present you the options you have in a nicely organized way ;-).
So it looks like Gnome's editable menu shortcuts have been developed just for
people like me, and indeed, it's a great thing to have. Unfortunately, it
turns out that there are some problems for
blindly-type-the-mnemonics-as-if-they-were-commands sort of people like me.
One example: In Nautilus, for some file types there is an "open with" ("Öffnen
_mit" in my case) menu item in the file dialog. I often routinely type Alt+D
(for the file menu, German "_Datei") followed by m to access the "open with"
submenu. If I happen to perform this sequence when a file is selected for
which there is no such submenu, this key sequence messes up the keyboard
shortcut for the first item in the file menu and changes it to m. Frankly,
that sucks. Depending on the "mode" that is determined by the file type, the
same keystroke either opens a harmless submenu or messes up your keyboard
shortcuts.
The least I would expect is a simple yes/no confirmation dialog before doing
the change. I guess this should only be very few lines of code. In the docs
there is a warning about the risks of this feature (accidentally removing the
shortcut from another command), so I think such a precautionary measure is
clearly justified, although I'm otherwise not necessarily such a big fan of
annoying confirmation dialogs. Changing the shortcuts certainly isn't
something you do very frequently, so the inconvenience is minimal, but the
safety gain would be considerable.
I think a more elegant solution would be to make this feature totally
"modeless" (in the sense described above). I'm not sure what would be the best
thing to do. Possibly a right click onto the menu item (or alternatively a
Ctrl+Enter or something when using the keyboard only) could pop up a dialog
that allows inputting the new shortcut, ideally reporting if there is a
conflict with another command that this shortcut has been assigned to
previously (if this is at all technically feasible). This would prevent the
above suggested confirmation dialog to appear every time an arbitrary key is
hit while a menu item is selected.
Sorry if this already has been addressed... Despite all criticism, keep up the
great work! I enjoy using Gnome.
Thomas W.
Just a loosely related P.S. re arbitrary keystrokes in menus: I must say that
much to my chagrin, for navigating menus with the keyboard, Windows (XP at
least) happens to be more friendly to me than Gnome/GTK. When pressing a key
while a menu is open, it first checks whether there is a matching mnemonic
shortcut and otherwise jumps to the first menu item that starts with this
letter, so you don't have to press the cursor keys until you're there.
Especially for menus that are more dynamic (like the open with submenu in
Nautilus) and therefore don't support mnemonic shortcuts, this is very useful.
This behavior has obviously been implemented in the submenus of Gnome's
Application/System menus. Why only in the submenus? Why doesn't it work for
all items in the last documents submenu of the Places menu? Why not apply this
behavior to all menus in all applications? It's such subtle things that can
safe you virtually thousands of keystrokes. This is not only a question of
time an convenience but also of health (speaking of repetitive strain
injury/mouse arm).
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