GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 563004
Change Ctrl-L keybinding
Last modified: 2008-12-26 13:35:08 UTC
The Ctrl-L keybinding to clear the conversation history is horribly annoying. At this point, most applications (most notably nautilus, but others as well) have followed the lead of Firefox to use Ctrl-L to present a "Go to location" UI. It is remarkably annoying when you press Ctrl-L expecting this and yet your current conversation is cleared due to empathy accidentally still having focus. Moreover, "L" is on the home-row of most keyboard layouts, thereby making it extremely easy to hit accidentally. Other information:
It has been suggested that fixing #443884 might make changing this keybinding a little more bearable for some users used to Ctrl-L.
On the other hand CTRL-L is what every program that has the same functionality uses. If hitting CTRL-L by mistake is a problem the shortcut can be overridden just moving on the menu item and choosing the new one (or backspace to delete it).
Just to motivate this bug a little bit: int0x0c: I have hit Ctrl-L accidentally countless times, requiring me to interrupt my thought, go up to the menu, open the log window, find the log, restore my previous mental state, and then keep two windows open until I'm finished referring to the conversation history. From a desktop usability standpoint, that's a pretty destructive operation for a home-row keybinding.
I just opened a Launchpad bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xchat/+bug/304477) to see what the Ubuntu folks have to say about this.
Bug 550885 is the same issue ("From time to time, I accidentally hit Ctrl-L, which clears my scrollback.") *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 550885 ***