[ge-talk] new way for keyboard shortcuts

[Waldemar Kornewald]

Hi Ari,

On 1/30/07, Ari Haviv <arielbhaviv at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lots of people want to use the OS and apps just by using the keyboard.
> Some have to. There are several problems though:
> 1) so many to remember and the shortcuts aren't always intuitive
> 2) there's a limit to how many shortcuts before you end up having to
> hold 3 letters at the same time
> 3) no visual feedback.
>
> My solution: press control and out pops up an edit field (similar to
> what you get if you type / in firefox) and you enter a command and hit
> enter.
>
> So you'd hit control, type cut, hit enter and the selected text would be cut.
> Another advantage is that you could type page down and not have to
> reach all the way to the page down key.

There is already a similar concept and you can even buy software for
Windows that does exactly this. The commands are available in *all*
applications, though. For example, I can select text within Firefox
and type "word count" (it's sufficient to type the first few letters
because it's auto-completed) and I automatically know how many words
my selected text has. There are also commands for "spellcheck" and
"define" (gets definition of the selected word) and you can even
launch applications that way.

But instead of having to press CTRL and then ENTER (which is modal)
you just hold down CAPSLOCK (yeah, this key finally becomes useful!)
and type the command. Release CAPSLOCK and it gets executed.

I think that this is only useful for experts. It's basically the
combination of GUI and CLI. I was thinking of using CAPSLOCK for
running queries and executing applications instead of as a general
command key. This *could* even be realistic for R2 (or maybe even R1
if someone implements the input_server filter?).

Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald