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.
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.
Option (a) imposes usability harm on users; users have been sending in bug reports about this, so I believe it to be an imperfect strategy. Option (b) is the ideal solution, however it would be extremely difficult to convince them to stop using Alt+Click and Alt+Drag, and only somewhat less so to convince them to implement overloadable shortcuts (which would be the perfect solution); in either case, we'd still be faced with waiting at least a year or two before the changed DE became widespread enough that we could consider it fixed.
Thus option (c) is best here. It is not much work on our part, it addresses the issue, makes life easier on users, and leaves open option b if it becomes possible some day.
I'm curious how many users actually utilize that WM feature.
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.
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.
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?
Bryce