Re: Key bindings proposal

[joakim]

Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 1:11 PM,  <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 12:20 PM,  <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I dont understand this. I normaly have menus disabled, but I enabled
>>>> them now to see. In the File menu I have an entry like:
>>>>
>>>>  "Visit new file... C-x C-f"
>>>>
>>>> Isn't that a "keyboard accelerator"?
>>>
>>> Yes, but it is not menu accelerators. Those are underlined chars in
>>> the menus. (At least on w32 all applications I know of have them,
>>> except Emacs.)
>>
>> But did you snip the part about how firefox does it here?
>>
>> Firefox does the same thing as emacs, it only uses "menu accelerators"
>> when it doesnt provide a specific keybinding.
>
> No. At least on w32 it normally shows both keyboard and menu
> accelerators in the menus. See the "View" submenu for example.
>
>> see the "organize bookmarks" example.
>
> That is a bit special since it is a list of your bookmarks.
>
> (Also a lot of add-ons in Firefox does not add menu accelerators the
> way the are supposed. Some add them when they should not and others
> omit them when they should add them.)
>
>> (As a side-note I always want to try to emacsify a program rather than
>> programify emacs, so I do understand the urge to arrive at a consistent
>> overall environment)
>
> Is not that quite a lot more work ... ;-)
>
>>>> Or do you mean there is no obvious way to traverse the menus from the
>>>> keyboard? Could we then promote the use of F10 already in the menu bar
>>>> text? (f10 is bound to menu-bar-open here)
>>>>
>>>> perhaps like the 1st line of the help menu or something:
>>>>
>>>>  "Use F10 to start traversing menus with kbd"
>>>
>>> That is not the standard way to access menus (at least not on w32).
>>> You normally use the Alt key to access them. (Here too it is important
>>> to notice that with all applications I know of on w32 you can access
>>> menus that way. Except Emacs.)
>>> Maybe it is still good to tell about f10 since most non-Emacs users
>>> are not aware of that.
>>
>> I wasnt either. I sort of just stumbled about the keyboard to see if
>> something activated menu traversal :)
>>
>> Anyway, what would you do with emacs normal use of alt then?
>
> In my patched version of Emacs on w32 you can use the left and/or
> right window keys as alt instead.
>
> Some people here has said that this is just as bad since that
> overrides the normal use of those keys. I do not agree for two
> reasons:
>
> - microsoft has made it possible to override those keys totally, while
> you can not totally override the alt key.
> - using the alt key is far more common than using the windows key.
>
>> Should alt be an emacs event in itself? Maybe this is possible already?
>
> See above.
>
>> As another related side-note I would like to experiment with modal 
>> keybindings
>> in Emacs, to implement something like ctrl-lock functionality. That
>> would I suppose be similar to your use-case for the alt key.
>
> Except that the window manager does not let you handle all key
> combinations with the Alt key. (You can not override for example
> Alt-Tab on w32. And that is a good thing in my opinion.)

My particular interest is not in making Emacs fit a particular WM such
as W32 or Metacity or Compiz. My interest is making Emacs be able to do
things a WM does, but more, for example "m-x
inkscape-set-object-fill-color". Anyway, that is stuff for another
thread, so I bow out of this thread now.

-- 
Joakim Verona