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Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Galleries and focus handling

Charles Moir wrote:
Alex said
Equally, I think if you clicked in a text field in the info bar (which can't close anyway) and hit CTRL-W you'd expect the document to close. 

Ah there's the rub. Does it?  I would have though Ctrl-W (or Alt-F4) in
text field would mean close this dialog. After all the dialog is the
window with focus and Ctrl-W means 'close this window'. It doesn't mean
'close that window over there that doesn't even have focus'


But the bar itself can neither have focus (in the sense that
anything lights up) nor can it close!
The advantage of getting rid of this is then the (modeless) dialog NEVER has to handle any keypresses. Only the control does. 

Still don't see the difference, which strikes me purely as a technical
implementation issue. Yes the control handles key presses, and Ctrl-W
should mean 'close the window I'm in'.


Well, that's one way of looking at it I suppose. I don't think we
are going to agree on this. I think I look at it from a "Window
manager" point of view (where these are all functions of the
window manager rather than the application). It may actually
not be possible to intercept them if the window does have focus
so you may get your way by default on GTK!
the align dialog with its current UI would be a case in point; this would look like a normal dialog but NO document keys would work. 

Er, unless you clicked on one of its menus to make it pop-up in which
case keys and arrows etc should navigate that menu.


Sure.
To be honest though, I'd rather just make the align dialog modal (or fix it's UI so it didn't have apply and close buttons, i.e. 
worked like the colour picker) than do this.


Modal - no way. This dialog is a great example of the benefits of
non-modal dialogs. You can change your selection, edit your document, do
anything you like and then just click Apply to apply the last align
settings to the new selection. I use it all the time.

Ah and there's a reason why the Apply button is needed still !


Because you want to keep the /settings/ in the dialog, and
otherwise changing the selection would necessarily reset them.
Hmmm... yes.


But generally yes those controls should be live preview (as should
everything) so adjusting the settings has an immediate effect. I agree
with that completely.

But then that leaves the above case, of wanting to apply various dialog
settings to a new selection. Can't see really why we can't have both
interactive controls and an Apply button. But perhaps that's a bit
weird.


It would be difficult if you needed more than one setting. For instance,
it would mean you would always have to have the radio buttons set right
BEFORE you picked the combo choice. That would, I think be confusing.
The combo would perhaps be better substituted by action buttons or
something in this case. In which case you are not really too far off
a commit button anyway. Hmmm....

Carl wrote:
> You will also get users that vehemently insist that CTRL-W should
> delete a line of text

Now we all know CTRL-W /really/ deletes a word, and you save
documents by using :w :-)

> Getting keybindings "right" is really hard, (probably only slightly
> less difficult than getting focus right---and again, there are huge
> piles of focus-related issues in both Mozilla and GNOME as well).

Keybindings I /think/ are slightly easier because we /know/ there
is no right answer because one lot of users will want it to work
like Illustrator, another like Inkscape, another like Xara etc.
etc., and whatever, the window manager will have stolen all the
nice shortcuts. So whatever, we /know/ we need a fully configurable
set of key bindings. I don't think we can usefully do that with
focus though (I might be wrong).

Alex