On Fri, 14 Oct 2005, MenTaLguY wrote:
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 23:03:25 -0400 From: MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> To: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> Cc: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...>, Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...>, Inkscape is a vector graphics editor inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: changes to keyboard shortcuts
On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 18:13 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
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)
For the moment I am going to avoid commenting on any of the interpersonal issues; however, just for the record I remember bulia's patch working. IIRC it also worked for Nathan after a 'make clean'.
Anyway, from a technical/user standpoint:
- We are going to have to defer any concrete action on key mappings
until the 0.44 development cycle starts up.
Fair enough. Part of the reason I made the push now is because I am unsure how much time I will be able to continue to spend watching inkscape develop as closely as I have been. (Also the longer things go without being changed the harder it can become to change them.)
- Now that we're so established, making significant changes to the key
mappings without configurability is a non-starter for the users.
I understand how current Inkscape users and users already familar with Sodipodi style bindings could be put out by any changes but on the other hand it isn't like anyone claimed Inkscape was stable, supported and not going to change. Similar arguements of comfort could have been used for keeping a great many things which have changed since Inkscape forked from Sodipodi. Some users (particularly those with dual head setups it seems) continue to yearn for certain elements of the Sodipodi interface and in future Inkscape may be able to accomodate them too but you didn't let that stop you from making fairly massive changes which ended up making Inkscape palettable to a much wider audience.
However the current keybindings do not seem like the best defaults for new users and beginners, or infrequent users. I hope you can agree on that because when fully switchable keybindings become available we will end up asking very similar questions about what the defaults should be.
I sincerely believe existing users and the heavy use pro users are the people most capable of adapting to any change be that learning a new set of keybindings or ideally switching back to keybinding profile in the "Sodipodi style" (I think that is a reasonable description of the arrangement Function keys inkscape which Inkscape inherited).
- Someone (probably me... I have a design in mind now) is simply going
to have to write some code for customizable key mappings.
Jon mentioned Actions which I believe brings with it the output to a standard lisp style menurc file.
At that point, Alan's patch becomes an XML file and we stick it in share/keys.
This issue doesn't go really go away as easily as you might hope and even when keyboard profiles are available there remain the questions of what most appopropriate keybindings are and for whom. The problem can also be reduced in cases where keybindings have been used as a way to micro optimised repetative behaviour and inkscape can be streamlined to tackle the larger tasks.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/