On Sun, 10 Dec 100, Miles O'Neal wrote:
>>* I cannot use 90% of GIMP's features from keyboard. Hardly any of the
>> menus have keyboard shortcuts.
>
> You can add all the menu shortcuts you want. They're completely
> customizable. Given the number and potential mixes of plugins, this
> is a reasonable solution.
Actually, no. Since you were more concerned with professionalism of my
email rather than actually reading it, you missed the part where I talked
about this exact problem. There is a difference between assigning a
shortcut key to activate a menu item when the menu is not open, and a
key to operate the menu by using the keyboard. I know the former is
easily customizable by pressing the desired key combo while an item is
selected. However there is no way to set the last one, without changing
menu definitions. Gtk provides the "_" character in gtkitemfactory and
other places for this purpose. The top-most menus in Gimp have these
keys, but anything below does not. I am talking something like pressing
Alt-F to open the File menu, then pressing "O" to open the "Open..." menu.
Or Alt-H to get to Help, then "A" to get the about dialog. etc. Most of
you probably don't care though, and that's exactly why my original email
generated nothing but angry responses. You consider adding this kind of a
feature a waste of time, and at the same time focus on adding useless non
customizable features like tearoff menus.
Another serious issue... I noticed, you just added a "Revert
Image?" dialog to gimp 1.1.30. Sure, it's useful, but what about the
button order? When a dialog comes up that asks you to do something that
will possibly destroy your image, shouldn't the default button be set to
"No"? Shouldn't both buttons have keyboard hotkeys as "Y" and
"N"? Shouldn't I be able to hit "esc" key and that would be the same as
clicking "No" button? All of the above things are not "fluff", they
provide for a consistent and properly behaving user interface. By the
way, its "lose", not "loose". But that's a seriously minor issue compared
to ones I enumerated above.
There are numerous examples of this kind of behaviour throughout The Gimp.
A lot of it would be trivial to fix (default button order, for example),
but many things are by-design difficult to implement in GTK (keyboard
hotkeys on each control on a dialog box, or pressing "Y" or "N" for yes
and no buttons) because unfortunately it was never designed to be operated
from a keyboard.
So, my friends, don't get your panties in a bunch because a perfectly
valid email includes the word "shit" in it's title. The only reason I got
this kind of response is either because a) you know about all of these
problems and furious that you can't fix them due to toolkit deficiencies,
or b) you seriously don't understand my concerns.
By the way, in the "real world" the features I described above fit under
the category of "accessibility". It's about allowing people with
disabilities to use full features of your program. Sure, if you don't
have enough fine control to open a menu using a mouse, then maybe drawing
in Gimp would be useless, too, but it's not up to the program developers
to judge things like this. Another category this goes under is
"usability". It wastes my time and makes me less productive to have to
move the mouse in order to get rid of a dialog box I opened by
mistake. It's dangerous to have default action buttons set to more
destructive responses in a message box. The list goes on and on.
I would like to hear some thought-out responses on the questions raised in
my original email, and in this one.
You can ignore "bad language" in the first one, because you can still
perfectly understand the issues raised there. If you think they are
issues in the first place. Apparently, some people don't.
tc
--
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timecop at japan.co.jp | ＯＡ通信サビース株式会社 | NTT DoCoMo
I thought everything that Linus Torvalds is involved with was divine
perfection? Must be a problem with NEC and Sony -about Crusoe recall
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