GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 311672
Clean up of Layout Options
Last modified: 2011-07-14 15:58:45 UTC
Opened the keyboard preferences dialog and checked out "Layout Options". Wohoha! Expandorama! Maybe some options should be removed, rethought, maybe some other layout approach taken (comboboxes?) or whatever (I've never needed to use this part of the keyboard preferences dialog so I don't really know what I'm talking about)... But seriously, 8 expanders!?! 8 expanders filled with check boxes and radio buttons. It isn't even obvious to me what what most of them mean or how useful they are. Heck, scrollbars are even _needed_ to fit the content of 5 of the expanders in the dialog. If we (err, mostly you ;) can't come up with a better design (perhaps this should be brought to the usability list?) then maybe the use case for this part of the dialog should be reconsidered? Maybe it should be in an extra utility (not part of the control-center) to configure all this stuff. Maybe, I don't know. (Sorry if I come off as a bit harsh, but this tab just blew my mind ;)
Some of these really need to be merged into the keyboard shortcuts applets. That is probably the best place for them.
These options are useful, which ones do you want to remove? Ccing usability to get their opinion on that.
Corey, they CANNOT be merged to shortcuts. Because this stuff is handled by X server, not GNOME. And the list of options is provided by X server, not GNOME.
Sebastien: I'm just saying that maybe removing stuff not used that often should be kept in mind if a better layout can't be thought up. I don't know if anything if what can be removed (since I don't know what most of the options do or how useful they are). Sergey: Pardon my ignorance, but why is that? If they can be discovered and set in here why can't they be somewhere else? (I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I really want to know). I can understand if you mean that they really don't fit in the keyboard shortcuts capplet's list since you can have whichever key combo you want for the actions (how do you say "only these combinations can be selected" in a good way?). Anyway, I don't think moving the checkboxes and radio buttons around between capplets is enough.
Text like "Third level chooser", "Group Shift/Lock behavior", "Use keyboard LED to show alternative group", etc. somehow makes me wonder if this really is meant for Mom & Pop, hence the idea (again, only an idea) to move it out of the control-center into some "power user" tool. (And I can't strees this enough, take what I say with a grain of salt since I've never needed to use these options or learn what they mean.)
Well, they can be somewhere else - but they don't fit into 'shortcuts' dialog properly, because user cannot choose any arbitrary shortcut for switching the layouts - there is a FIXED LIST of them provided by the server. Currently, shortcuts dialog allows user to choose ANY shortcut. The wording of the layouts is poor. That is true. And if anyone would have trouble translating it from technical to human - I'd appreciate it very very much. I can even explain what every option is doing. But again, this is not under gnome direct control - it all comes from X server (technically, I have some influence on the data provided by xorg).
Marking this as NEW.
Where can I get a list of what all these mean so this can be documented in the User Guide? "Third level chooser", "Group Shift/Lock behavior", "Use keyboard LED to show alternative group" etc are meaningless to me.
There is no such documentation AFAIK. Moreover, this list is different for different servers (for example, for Xorg 6.8 it is not same as for Xorg 7.0 with xkeyboard-config installed). But if you are interested - we could discuss this on IRC.
11 expanders (... and counting...? ;)
Sorry, make that 12...
*** Bug 617432 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is also affecting all releases, 3.1.3 is the latest one, and this bug still exists in that release.
Recently Peter Hutterer added auto-generation of man page to xkeyboard-config (based on base.xml file). Could the same thing be done for GNOME - using that XML as the documentation source?
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 654617 ***