GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 350045
key bindings are awful to edit
Last modified: 2009-02-08 02:07:57 UTC
In tomboy 0.3.5, keybindings are awful to edit from pref window: you need to write by hand the keybinding. This is not convenient and error-prone. I'd suggest to allow editing of shortcuts in a similar fashion than how the keyboard shortcut capplet does it, ie by waiting for the actual new shortcut to be composed. In gedit we do something similar with a GtkEntry. You can look at the bottom of http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gedit/plugins/externaltools/tools/manager.py?rev=1.9&view=markup (the accelerator stuff).
I think the keybindings should be killed altogether from the tomboy preferences. Instead, we should add "Create new note" as a predefined action to the keybinding capplet. The other hotkeys which tomboy currently offers are on crack, imo. No application should be allowed to define a global hotkey for its context menu.
Given that the menu keybinding exposes the main navigation UI (the menu), I think it is warranted. Tomboy would be massively less useful for me without it.
Steve: The problem with the gedit approach is that it will not block other keypresses from being interpreted, such as label mnemonics and the close button, which is pretty confusing. It also doesn't intercept other global keybindings, which can be confusing as e.g. typing Alt-F4 will close the window (it's a common window manager shortcut), idealy instead we would show a warning about the keybinding already being taken. The gnome keybinding capplet uses GtkCellRendererAccel which works around these problems, but there is no GtkEntry-based equivalent unfortunately.
Alex, you could try to use GtkCellRendererAccel with a GtkCellView, although I'm not sure if the cell view will work ok for editing right now. But I still think that the whole approach of editing global keybindings in app-specific preference dialogs is broken by design. How do you intend to handle conflicts with other keybindings ?
Basically, I don't intend to. I can show a warning if a keybinding is already taken, but not much else. We could add all the Tomboy keybindings to the Gnome keybinging capplet, but I don't know if people are up for this. We'd probably want to add deskbar's as well. But this idea is somewhat confusing given that neither Tomboy nor deskbar may be on a person's panel. I'd probably keep the settings in preferences anyway to make it more discoverable and to support non-Gnome people.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=410758 seems to be related to this bug.
From a l10n point of view, this is also awful! Users are bound to enter key names in English, not talking about the "disabled" string :-(
The compiz settings manager (ccsm) might be something to mimic for editing hotkeys.
Created attachment 98393 [details] ccsm hotkey editing screenshot
Setting the default assignee and QA Contact to "tomboy-maint@gnome.bugs".