[ge-talk] new way for keyboard shortcuts

[Paul van Nugteren]

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007 09:26:30 +0100, "Waldemar Kornewald"
<wkornewald at haiku-os.org> said:
> 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

I was thinking of something in that regard myself, a combo of CLI and
GUI. I think that if there is no confirmation dialog you should at least
have some sort of undo stack. If anything happens, ctrl+z or alt+z is
your friend : ) It took years until I realized it works even in
webmail's (select text, accidentally press any non meta key and
everything is replaced, do a ctrl+z and it's back again)



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