On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 08:34:22PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
On 10/14/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> wrote:
It is a very common operation, but nearly all the zoom operations are already mapped to the number keys and to +/- anyway, so in practice I find the zoom tool itself is not that needed.
True for professional users. Newbies may still use Zoom tool quite often.
I would argue that similarly, Newbies would be using the Zoom tool via the icon, rather than the keyboard shortcut, but I think neither of us have any data to support our positions.
What are your proposals for mappings?
Like I said - just make a complete profile with Xara keys. Of course it's not 1:1 because some things have no correspondence, but we can try to be as close as possible. This will (1) solve the F1 problem and (2) be a first step towards the grand Xara/Inkscape merge that we all talk so much about recently. I think these advantages are well worth it. But just uprooting F1 and some adjacent keys is not enough justification for a change, IMHO.
Well, that's a good proposal, but I was thinking more along the lines of alternate proposals for those two particular keys.
One could also equally well argue the inverse - for Xara/Inkscape merge considerations, the primary key mappings should start migrating in that direction, and that if people wish to retain the current mappings, then that should be the one done as an overlay profile.
Secondly, if something matters even to a minority, we cannot bluntly disregard this minority. We are not a commercial entity who might afford to do that.
Of course, this same logic could be applied to Alan; he may be the minority, and rejecting his patch and suggestions is equivalent to disregarding his minority.
Please realize that by making the process of proposing keyboard changes be such a gauntlet to run
What are you talking about, Bryce? Did I make it too diffucult for Alan to propose his changes here? Nope, in fact he did so on my urging. Do I have to abstain from criticizing his proposal? Why?
Actually yes, IMHO, you are making it difficult to propose changes. Alan's original goal was simply to propose that F1 should be mapped to Help. A lot of applications use this key for help, so it's not that exotic of an idea; indeed, it makes Inkscape more conformant with GUI software in general.
He had initially brought this up back in July. He'd commented that there were usability regressions and you challenged him to specify them. Among his suggestions was that the F1 key was mis-mapped, compared with what Illustrator/Freehand users were used to. His You rebuffed and dismissed his suggestion. You commented something about Xara keymapping compatibility being more important to you than Illustrator. He indicated at the time that it was difficult to make these suggestions because he felt like he was being ignored.
Later, he tried again. He had noted that Xara also uses F1 for help so decided that since you said this was important to you, to focus his suggestion on it making Inkscape *more* Xara-compatible like, in order to win your support.
We have also told him that suggestions are better received if they're sent in form of a patch rather than just comments on the mailing list, because it gives something tangible to review. He didn't have a whole lot of experience making patches, but despite the difficulties for him, he took the challenge to try it. He kept the patch simple, just changing a single key.
Yet within an hour or so of submitting it, you unilaterally rejected it. You could have chosen to phrase it like, "Thanks for the patch, I'm okay with F1 mapping to Help, but we need to also map what had been there to another key, can you please account for that?" Instead, you criticized it, described it as "rejected" and "unacceptable", and closed it as rejected, as if saying you were 100% opposed to keyboard shortcut change proposals.
At this point, if it were me trying to get a patch in, I would throw up my hands in frustration. "Rejected" and "unacceptable" are very harsh terms to use, especially for someone's first patch, especially if the rationale is subjective as is typically the case for usability issues like keyboard mappings.
However, Alan was a trooper. Even though his patch was closed as rejected, he considered your criticisms and tried again. He recognized that one of your comments (develop a sophisticated keybinding configuration system) was going to be well beyond his abilities, but took your other criticism (that the change disabled the Node tool) to heart and created another, more sophisticated patch, that shuffled more keys around to match Xara (again, believing that your initial argument of Xara-compatibility would make you better pre-disposed to the changes).
But next, you added more work to his plate, saying the proposal would continue to be rejected unless he posted a complete proposal to the list, with detailed rationale, plus comparisons with two major apps, build a subcommunity of users, then also make some special code to give you the ability to keep using the old layout.
Herein again, you could use language like, "this is good, but would be better if..." but instead use language like, "it is not acceptable... this shows you are inexperienced..." etc. These phrasings can be perceived as rude and impolite, and judging from Alan's comments, were indeed perceived this way. Others who view this interaction may also perceive this as rude, and not wishing to be subject to rudeness may decide it safer to never propose keyboard changes themselves; thus effectively increasing the (social) difficulty of proposing changes.
But Alan stuck with it again, and wrote up a very nice (perhaps the most detailed and complete) proposal to the list, with rationale, etc. Several people expressed general agreement with the concept, thus showing that there was a subcommunity of users accepting the change; no one other than you expressed disagreement.
At this point you could say, "Thank you for doing all this work, even though your mappings make it closer to Xara, I still prefer my mappings but since you've done all I requested, and it sounds like so far I am the only one defending my layout, let's try yours for 0.44 and see if anyone in addition to me objects." Instead, you took a hostile stance saying that his patch stood a "100% chance of being rejected", implied his opinions were not valuable because you were using Inkscape for "real work" (as if Alan's role in working with improving interoperability with the GNOME community, Abiword, GIMP, etc. was not real work), and so forth.
You also say that while his proposal makes Inkscape more Xara-like, you don't want that, you want your own personal keymapping preferences to be the standard. Then you up the ante by saying he must produce a 100% accurate keyboard mapping to Xara, with full detailed documentation and so on, before any further consideration can be made. This is completely contradictory to your statements that you prefer incremental changes over wholesale ones like that, and directly contradicts your own statement that you yourself like to pick and choose which Xara mappings to have.
We know Alan's motivation here is that his interest is in _Illustrator_ mappings, not Xara, so your demand is going to be completely a non-starter for him I'm sure.
Honestly, I wonder if all of this is less about keyboard mappings and more just a big clash of personalities. You two have tended to be polarized on issues you both care about. As I see it, Alan is working hard to try and find a compromise with you, and you keep raising the bar to a point that it beyond his reach and saying things that can be perceived as closed and unfriendly. Personally, I don't care about the F-key mappings, but it pains me to see Alan trying so hard to find a way to work with you, and to see it being made so difficult for him.
I'm reminded by your own 'first hack' to Inkscape... http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=3422500&forum_id=... We were encouraging of your work (even though your first patch didn't work), and emphasized the importance in Inkscape to keep development open and friendly.
Anyway, I'm certainly going way overboard on this post but I think in these days with the Inkscape/Xara collaboration on the horizon, it is even *more* important that we hone our skills at being open, friendly, and accepting of ideas we may disagree with. If things work out well, we are going to need to build good working relationships with a number of new developers, and to tap into a whole new userbase. I think there are going to be a lot of potential for head butting in the future between people who have strong preferences one way or another, and if we can all develop good skills for finding compromises we will succeed. If we frustrate each other, things may fragment. Remember it was hard headedness and failure to be able to find good compromises that led to the Inkscape/Sodipodi split in the first place. If we are going to achieve a merge, we are going to have to get good at doing exactly the opposite.
Bryce