Re: Re: Design for Keyboard Shortcut Behaviour

Karl O'Keeffe <[email protected]> wrote:

> On May 26, 2004, at 4:00 am, Jonathan Harper wrote:
>>> As for Alt+Tab, what about making it open the traditional
>>> dialog box, but with the option of using arrow keys to jump
>>> around more quickly? Or something, because I'll be the first
>>> to admit that it's ugly, annoying, and frustrating. If I have
>>> twelve applications open, pressing Alt+Tab ten times to get 
>>> to the application I used ten times ago, I've wasted my time.
>>> Or Alt+Tab could highlight the tasks in the taskbar, and the
>>> arrow keys could allow one to navigate through them. Letting
>>> go would then bring that application to the forefront.
> 
> Yeah some alternative is needed as well I think. But I'd like to
> make sure that it provided a real difference in efficiency over
> alt-tab.
> 
> I'm not sure if using the arrow keys to navigate around is that
> much better than alt-tab, but I'm happy to have you convince me.

I think the alt-tab should work pretty much as it does today, though 
I would give it one big change: make it a list where each line is an 
application window with an icon to change to and each line has a 
number or a letter (1..9, 0, a..z, A...Z) so I can change directly 
to that window with one keypress. The old 
line-of-icons-in-the-center-with-current-title-below isn't good 
because I usually have too many windows with the same icon to make 
sense.

Note that alt-tabbing would still reorganize windows and "key 
mapping" to each window would change so I couldn't trust that 
alt-tab-8 is always the same window, instead it would be the 8th 
window in the list that comes up when I press alt-tab. The behavior 
would still be sensible, pressing alt-tab-2 would bring up window 
that was active 2 windows ago. alt-tab-a would bring window that was 
active 11 (10+first letter of alphabets) windows ago. Selecting that 
window would bring that window to top of the list just like 
alt-tab-tab-tab-tabbing would do.

Perhaps add another key combination in addition to alt-tab that pop 
ups the same dialog but doesn't require holding down any key. My 
current window manager (IceWM) brings up something like this when I 
press Windows-ESC (in which I can type the few letter from the name 
of the window - without holding any special key down - and press 
enter to change to it. If there're multiple similarly named windows, 
repeating the key will select next. For example, pressing X twice 
followed by ENTER will change to second XMMS window).

-- 
Mikko