On Sat, 8 Nov 2003, bulia byak wrote:

Still more keys today. See the wiki page. Notably, esc now deselects and cancels rubberband selection. Also, lots more ways to switch tools and call dialogs. The program is becoming actually usable :)

Actually, the bulk of the Sodipodi shortcuts programming task is now ready. However, quite a few bits remain, and still more are in my plans. It's addictive :)

Sorry I've been committing all this right before the release, but I think it's unlikely to break anything. However, anyone please test the new keys before making a release.

I'm testing out the keyboard shortcuts with CVS HEAD as of 11/9/03 1000 PST. Notes below...

Tool switching ============== F1 and Ctrl F6 don't seem to do what they're supposed to; all of the rest of the shortcuts worked as documented (both the letter and function key variants).

Opening dialogs =============== All of these worked as documented. Also, I noticed almost all of these shortcuts can be operated with the left hand only; nice touch. :-)

It would be nice to have a shortcut to the Editing Window added (or even better would be keyboard shortcuts to turn grid and snap on/off directly).

I noticed that ESC works for many of the dialogs but not all. The export window, for example, didn't respond to Esc.

Zoom and scroll =============== + on the keypad works for zooming in, but the regular + key doesn't. The = key zooms properly. Both '-' keys work. 0 and 1 work.

We probably need a keyboard mapping for "Fit the whole selection into the window". Perhaps one of the number keys to keep with the scheme?

Also note that keypad-5 is mapped to "Fit the whole drawing into window", so that could be added to the docs. However, the regular 5 key isn't mapped. Since both regular and keyboard 0 and 1 are mapped, it seems sensible for both 5's to be likewise.

Undo/Redo ========= Ctrl-z, Ctrl-shft-z, and ctrl-y all work ok.

Mapping Ctrl-z and Ctrl-shift-z to the opposite actions is kind of slick; makes it easy to quickly scroll up and down through the transaction log. And having Ctrl-y mapped to the redo makes sense since that's a commonly expected mapping.

I wonder if for perfect balance, Ctrl-shft-y should be mapped to 'undo'?

File operations =============== Ctrl-w 'close window' only seems to work when the mouse is hovering over the window when the window system is set to click-to-follow mode.

I'm not sure what Ctrl-shft-n does, but it didn't seem to work for me.

Ctrl-shft-p did not pop up the print preview Ctrl-shft-s did not pop up the save file as box

Ctrl-q only exits if the cursor is in the editing window; it doesn't work when used over the toolbox nor if no document is loaded.

Selector tool shortcuts ======================= The arrow keys all worked as advertised - that's going to be a really nice enhancement. I noticed though that the keyboard arrows did not always work - the kbd up and down are mapped to zoom up/down, and the rt and left don't have actions. The kbd alt-arrows don't have action. All kbd-arrows with the shift or shift-alt modifiers work as documented.

Tab, shift-tab, and esc all work.

Ctrl-a 'select-all' also works but needs adding to the documentation.

The cut and paste keys work.

I'm wondering about ctrl-d though - in emacs and probably other apps it's mapped to the same function as the DEL key, whereas here it duplicates the selected item.

Home/end/pgup/pgdn all work. The keyboard versions of those aren't mapped similarly. I'm undecided if they should though; could be too much functionality for the keyboard.

I had a thought... What if we made the keyboard mappings not do any document changes, so that it's read only? What I'm thinking is that being able to rely on the keyboard as a read-only navigation interface would be handy since they could navigate around without having to worry about accidentally hitting the wrong key and fussing up the document.

Ctrl-g and ctrl-shft-g work for group/ungroup. Ctrl-u does ungroup; perhaps Ctrl-shft-u should group?

Ctrl-k and ctrl-shft-k work.

The mouse modifiers for stretch, rotate, skew, etc. all checked out. Are some of these new or had I just not known about them before? I am going to find Ctrl-move and alt-transform quite useful. :-)

Node edit tool shortcuts ======================== In editing mode, the regular arrows all worked as documented. Nice. The keyboard keys didn't do anything though.

I'm wondering if in node-edit mode it might be more useful for the keyboard arrowkeys to be left to view commands like moving the view window, zooming, etc. Hmm, maybe we need a stronger defined concept of what the keyboard does - either always precisely map to what the regular arrow, paging, etc. keys do, or map to some other useful mode like view-window control?

You've got shift-k and shift-l listed twice.

The shift-keys for node editing all checked out okay.

One thing that may be a bit awkward is with the unmodified keys, if you happen to on the canvas instead of precisely over a node, the key can cause you to leave node-edit mode and activate some other function. The s key, for instance, ends up selecting the object, and the b key activates the create-curve function.

I like the mapping for Ctrl-click to toggle smooth/cusp. THe other mouse editing shortcuts worked. Nice work all around.

Zoom tool shortcuts =================== Shift-right-mouse-button did not zoom out when in Zoom tool mode.

Rectangle tool shortcuts ======================== Documented shortcuts worked as indicated. Note that both can be used together (Ctrl-shift-drag)

Elipse/arc tool shortcuts ========================= Ditto above.

Note that star and spiral don't seem to do anything with the ctrl or shift modifiers.

Pen tool shortcuts ================== '+' did not toggle new shape vs. appending, as far as I could tell...

Also, F6 put me into 'new shape' pen mode where each 2 clicks created new lines instead of appending to current. The status bar text said 'a' would toggle, but I couldn't seem to get it to do that.

When I clicked on the "Draw precisely positioned curved and straight lings [B]" button, then the enter, escape, and backspace keys worked as documented. + and a still did not toggle (although 'a' put status bar text that indicated it had toggled.) I might not understand correctly what's being toggled here...

Transformation dialog shortcuts =============================== I didn't know how to activate these so wasn't able to test them. I tried them from within the transformation dialog as well as in the canvas itself, but nothing seemed to occur.

Context menu (right mouse button) ================================= I didn't understand what this did (make desktop sticky??) or how to activate it...

Altogether some nice enhancements to the application. Like you have said, there's more to be done but you're already going to make power users more productive. :-)

Bryce