GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 339742
Question to developers about tab changing
Last modified: 2006-04-29 14:27:41 UTC
This is more a question than a feature request itself, but it's a feature request in a way, and sorry if this was already discussed in the past. In every gtk based app i know, the keys used to change from one tab to another are Ctrl + PageUp/PageDown. However, in gedit (at least it's the only app i know which has this behavior) this is changed to Ctrl+Alt+PageUp/PageDown, which i at least, consider rather unpractical. So why does gedit features this behavior, and why isn't it changed to the GTK default ?
See bug #160747, bug #163494, bug #300289, bug #309792, bug #337298, and a few other ones. The reason is that the Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn accelerators are already used by the text widget. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 163494 ***
Well...yes...they are used by the text widget, but aren't those accelerators doing the same as Home/End ? At least it's what it seems to me. If that's so, what's the reason for these accelerators to duplicate an already existing action ?
They don't, or at least they don't when text wrapping is on : ctrl+pgup/pgdn go to the end of the "real line" which is being wrapped (the "paragraph"), while end goes to the end of the showed line (ie to the right end of the current line). Well, I admit I've never used it but some people do...
Well this is just my opinion but i believe that's a rather useless feature...at least it could have a different accelerator. It's really annoying to have another common feature changed because of a feature that's probably of a lot less common use than tab changing...but like i said, just my opinion as a common user...
By the way, someone pointed this out to me: This is really a BUG because it goes against the HIG, where it says that Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown should "Scroll selected view by one page left/right" (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/input-keyboard.html#standard-shortcuts)
I don't want to gang up on anyone but why does GEdit have to be a special case? In gnome-terminal Ctrl-PgUp/PgDown moves across the tabs, in Epiphany the same applies. Heck, even in MonoDevelop Ctrl-PgUp/PgDown moves across tabs. So the question is: how about a little consistency? Consistent behaviour improves the user experience with the entire desktop and that's all this should be about.
This has been discussed to death 76571 times. Search the archives of the usability mailing list or feel free to debate it once more there. The behavior is implemented by the gtk notebook: ctrl+pgup/down switches tab, unless the widget inside the page uses the shortcut. ctrl+alt-pgup/down always works. So it's not really up to gedit.