On Thu, 2002-10-10 at 02:00, Havoc Pennington wrote: > > Note, I'm not saying it's nonsense to dispute whether apps or WM > should own Alt+mouseclick in particular. I still have the gnome.org > bug open for consideration of that issue. > > However some people have asserted that the WM should not use any keys, > or that an acceptable solution to any key conflict is for people to > configure their WM. > > I don't think either of those are reasonable. It should all work > out-of-the-box, and there should definitely be window navigation > shortcuts out-of-the-box. When you say "window navigation shortcuts" do you mean stuff like alt+mouse1 that moves the window? These particular shortcuts that are only found on linux (xfree?) systems are not making any sense to me. To me they go into the category: "edit your shortcuts to enable". The functionality is already there. I can partly agree with the idea of not changing options to suit apps. But workflows are very important to me. Slowing my workflow means slowing my productivity. My problem is that you cannot possibly foresee how the future is going to be. By locking hardcoding shortcuts you effectively make some programs unuseable. Consider (I'm sure you have) that people work in applications, not WM's. If a good workflow in an application can be to use some shortcuts. If these shortcuts are eaten by the WM then you have to design around it and most likely end up with a workflow which is not optimal. I'm talking about huge apps like Maya and its likes. Almost every key you can reach with your left hand has a shortcut which uses a combination of alt, ctrl, shift and mouse buttons. My opinion is that the end user is the important one. Out of the box is good for almost everyone, but _not_ all. What you have done with the cvs is good in my opinion (not talking about the source here). I can disable what I don't need. That's really all that I'm asking. Whatever way that is done I don't mind much. As long as I can do it. On a different note: Is there any particular reason why alt-f2 doesn't move me to workspace 2 anymore (as with sawfish). I think the multiple workspace dropped greatly in workability because of that. Now I have to move my hand from the pen to the keyboard to change workspaces. I can live with it, but I prefer it the other way where I could just do it with the hand already on the keyboard. Best regards -Rene > So the question is just what the default window navigation shortcuts > should be. But once we decide what they should be, at some point it > has to be considered a bug if applications use those shortcuts, > whether the WM is configurable or not. > Since UNIX has historically had no standards at all here, and does not > fully map to windows (e.g. we have shortcuts to deal with workspaces), > I consider it unavoidable that some apps will need to change in order > to fix things that I consider bugs. I entirely do not agree, as stated above. > > In the past, conflicts between defaults have just not been considered > bugs, and people have just said "configure your WM" - I find this > broken. And this is the kind of breakage metacity's relative > non-configurability is largely intended to try to address - the same > basic issue arises in the case of many other preferences, where users > are expected to work around various kinds of apps by toggling prefs. > When the problem to work around creates inconvenience rather than > totally disabling an app, often I won't add workaronds for it, in the > interests of promoting motion toward a single "just works" solution. > > So that's all I'm saying. For sure, the issue of who should own > Alt+click is still open. > > Havoc >
