Daniel Pope wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 10:39:56AM -0800, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
IMNSHO, the "alt+drag to move window" wm shortcut is a very useless waste of what would otherwise be a very useful application shortcut. I'm curious how many users actually utilize that WM feature.
I have known people who have used and loved it. On less than polished WMs it is extremely useful in order to retrieve windows that have wanderered off the top of the screen.
On all X11 systems I use I remap the Alt-<something> keybindings of KDE to Super-<something>, the Super- modifier being mapped to the otherwise unused windows key. It's been a very long time since any common keyboard has come without the Windows key. To my mind it makes much more sense to use a key with a windows symbol for window management tasks than Alt-.
My preference would be to persuade developers of windows managers to use this key and leave Alt- free for productive use in applications.
Isn't the case for most users simply that they'll have to disable the default to get the window manager out of their way?
Exactly. I don't know if I would call it 'simply' though; it took me a good bit of searching to find exactly where in KDE to disable it (it's buried on a secondary tab of). I imagine most users won't be bothered to do this. Besides, why cause them to go to this trouble when the functionality is already available through another shortcut already hooked up, that doesn't conflict?
Document how to disable the Alt+ keybindings?
Another option is to choose different keybindings in Inkscape. I fear that this would involve toggle keys for the various modifier options. But modal interfaces are considered extremely bad news.
An option might be to map the Alt- modifiers to Alt- and Win- variants. Those in MS windows would use Alt, those in linux could use either Alt- or Win- whichever their window manager doesn't steal (I'm not quite sure about Mac users they seem to have strange keyboards). It would be easy to document with a simple note to linux users suggesting they try the Win- key if Alt- is taken.
John