bulia byak schrieb:
- All shortcuts that break must be found and replaced with new shortcuts
That's easily said. We don't have that much free shortcuts, you know. Those that still remain free by now are rather convoluted (ctrl+alt, numpad, etc). So you need to free some other key first, perhaps also by moving its action elsewhere. And besides, what will work for German keyboard will fail for French or Spanish, and vice versa.
In this specific case, I don't see much sense trying to free the single Alt+letter, because with our 40+ translations, some of them will _surely_ have a menu with that letter. Just consider Alt+letter combinations as an extra convenience that's not guaranteed to work. Or, if you want, create your own German-only keyboard map (but then you will also need to translate and update all documentation, and warn German users that English keyboard charts won't work for them - I think it's way more trouble than it's worth).
Just ask the Eclipse guys; they have the same problem. There simply isn't a good solution. Either the mappings will be different per system or per language or per user.
We could get rid of
- Inkscape should listen for keypresses when a menu is active and use
that key as a shortcut from now on (just like GIMP).
We have a different keyboard setup system. Maybe it can be somehow coupled with this GTK feature, but I don't know how. And personally, I always considered this "keyboard configuration via menus" very inconvenient and counterintuitive: when in a menu, I want to invoke actions, not reconfigure them.
Well, you have lots of hidden features in Inkscape as well which no one expects (like being able to drop copies by pressing space while dragging).
The advantage of the feature is: It's simple to use and to understand. It's very convenient since you are at the place where you want to be when you need it (so no need to click through large trees of commands to find the one you want to map). In fact, I felt it the best feature Gimp had. Just gets the job done, unlike all those keyboard mapping dialogs you can find anywhere else.
As for the "it didn't warn when you remapped a key that was used elsewhere" critique:
a) It would be simple to show a dialog in this case warning you b) so what? You can't really break much. If you find you need the old shortcut, it's just a keypress to restore it. And if you don't, well, you don't.
Regards,