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.
Could be, but given that both GNOME and KDE have this shortcut set as one of the defaults, we are left having to deal with reality. There seem to be three choices: a) Maintain our current approach of insisting users remap their DE shortcuts, b) convince KDE and GNOME to permit applications to have this shortcut, or c) adjust what we do to work around the limitation.
d) Try to disable the shortcuts while Inkscape is running. Sounds bizarre but it's similar to video players disabling the screensaver or whatever. Might be achievable with a bit of hackery. KWin offers a DCOP function to reload its configuration and it's possible that Metacity will offer something over D-Bus, or just signalling the process.
This wouldn't necessarily need to happen inside Inkscape code; it could just be a Bash wrapper for Inkscape, provided to packagers.
Compiz and Beryl make Inkscape unusable anway, unless a handful of effects and key bindings are disabled.
I don't know if any data exists to say how many users use this feature. However, speaking only for myself, I have found it useful on multiple occasions (I have a multi-head setup, and am frequently moving windows around to get them onto my main monitor). Despite knowing about this conflict for years, I still keep Alt+Click and Alt+Drag mapped for the WM.
That's ludicrous assuming you're a competent Inkscape user.
However, this is sort of beside the point - we can certainly convince ourselves that this is not a worthwhile WM feature, but it won't change the fact that it's still not available to us by default. You could try making this argument to Xorg, GNOME, KDE, and the various distros, but honestly I suspect the response would be that this Inkscape need simply isn't important enough to them to warrant considering changing it.
The argument doesn't just concern Inkscape on Linux. It ties in to Windows users migrating from a system that doesn't have this binding and where it is routine to use all available modifiers for mouse ops in applications, versus a system where this is a throwback to a time when GUI applications on X were neither complex or cross-platform.
The place to take this up would be freedesktop.org anyway.
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.
Dan