GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 590904
Ctrl+D (Control-Delete) is not documented in the Edit menu and has bad usability
Last modified: 2017-07-15 22:21:15 UTC
The usability of the Ctrl+D command needs to be retooled. (The command is used to entirely delete whatever paragraph has cursor focus). Here is my reasoning. 1. Gedit is the default text editor for many Gnome users. 2. Ctrl+D is not a command on the vast majority of text editors and/or word processors (meaning, yes, Mac OS/Windows and OpenOffice). 3. Ctrl+D can delete a whole paragraph in one key combo. (It's destructive). 4. Some users may hit Ctrl+D when they are aiming to hit Ctrl+S. 5. The command is *not documented* in the edit menu, unlike Copy/Paste. (This is likely because the Delete menu command and Ctrl+D are not the same). I imagine that many Gedit users find this key-combo very useful, but from the perspective of general usability it's really quite inappropriate. Either it should be off by default or at least documented somewhere in the menus. Other information:
Thanks for the feedback, I can see some of your reasons, however this is a discussion we had when introducing the action. "Delete line" is a very common action in text editors and something that has been requested many times in gedit before it was introduced. ctrl+D is a natural choice for that action because it is used in other editors. It's unfortunate that D is near to S, but the keys are just about 100 and every one of them is near to other commonly used actions. We also decided to not add a menu because exposing all actions in menu items would make the menu huge and this is an action that you would never use from a menu.
*** Bug 784983 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Please. :( Everything else is configurable. This isn't. This deletes my work, it has already done damage. There is no reason not to allow users to disable this. There is literally no argument against making this configurable, with the current state as the default.