Andrew Savory lists@andrewsavory.com wrote:
On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, MJ Ray wrote:
That seems to be exactly what they are doing, from reading their release notes. So screw all of you X users, mmmkay?
Or how about "Microsoft and Apple plough millions into usability studies, perhaps they have a point", or "if 95% of the population expect CTRL-A to select all, perhaps we should be consistent", or "current keybindings date back to limited capability terminals, it's time to move on"?
Just because its survived that long in the windows world does not make it a sane keybinding. How often do you actually need to select all? rarely. how often do you want to get to the beginning of a long line, or the end, or delete a word, often.
As long as it's reconfigurable, I don't see a problem.
How about actually because the keybinding should be correct by default and configurable to be broken. Select All is definately a broken default.
Brokenness of other applications is no reason to continue it.
Brokenness by what definition?
Actually, isn't Galeon GNOME/GTK+2, which is what I was complaining about?
Galeon is a mozilla derivative, so presumably has the same keybinding as Mozzilla, across _all_ platforms.
yes, moz does have the same broken keybinding. but how often in a graphical web browser are you wanting to select all? especially in X, when all you're going to get in the clipboard is the text. At the same time, you're probably not going to want to go to the beginning of the line though, so web browsers are not a prime example. And I think that you'll find that the keybindings for moz derivatives can be set by the client app, they only basically use the moz rendering engine.
Home is a very poor key for such a common function, being over on the navigation keypad, making you relocate your hands.
Only one hand, and only one keypress rather than an RSI-inducing key combo.
ROFL. guessing that Shift is also a bad modifier then... and that you don't often change desktops with the keyboard, or have any useful external bindings. Home is HOME, not "Start of line".
"Home" is a lot better for "start of buffer"
CTRL-Home
obviously you travel to the beginning of lines more than the start of the buffer. personally I do both quite often so find it handy when they're bound to sane places.
but the functions which are normally bound in the main keypad: start/end of line; delete backwards and forwards; transpose characters; mark/copy/kill/yank region; are there for a reason.
<comment type="inflammatory common sense"> I'd suggest they are there for *nix hackers and are a legacy from the limited-capability terminal days. They are not friendly to the mass audience. Let's dump the elitism and start doing what usability suggests is best for a change (as Red Hat and Gnome appear to be doing). After all, the hackers can always reconfigure. </comment>
I'd suggest that a majority of nix hackers are 'lazy', I don't mean that in the way of they just don't do anything, I mean that from the point of view that they can do things in as short a time as possible. I'd suggest that if a hacker that is needing these type functions lots of the time, finds that these key combos are useful, then maybe they actually are. 30+ years of use would suggest that they are far from non intuitive, and once learnt a great asset. Just because Billy Boy assigned a different set of keys for things, and carried that on through the series, does not mean that he was right in the first place. Familiarity is the only thing driving the argument, its certainly not common sense. There are by sheer marketing power more windows users out there than nux users. If everyone changes all the nux keybindings to be "Windows User Friendly" that's 30+ years of research and use of certain keybindings down the toilet. That's bloody ridiculous.
Oh well,
Just my 2ps worth...
(not that andrew will bother reading it)
Cheers,
Brett.