[MiNT] Hotkeys (Was: Re: Background)

[Jo Even Skarstein <joska@online.no>]

On Mon, 2011-09-19 at 21:09 +0200, Jean-François Lemaire wrote:

> Why are you sure? Do you know me so well? What I meant is you can't switch 
> between "applications" only with the keyboard. You must go through the whole 
> list of accessories and XaAES itself. In my use case, this means at least 10 
> CTRL+ALT+TABs to switch between qed and Toswin. Do you really find this to be 
> a great feature?

You're right, this is terribly user-UNfriendly. Not only is application
switching next to useless (due to the reasons you mention), but the idea
of combining two modifier keys is not good in itself. And Ctrl+Alt+Tab
especially is an ergonomic failure. So this is a feature I never use.

Some ten years ago I wrote my own Alt-Tab-handler for N.AES, because
N.AES suffers from the exact same problem. It was a copy of Windows'
Alt-Tab handler and copied it's most useful feature of always keeping
the previous top application at the top of the stack. It also displayed
a form with a list of running apps so you could see how many keypresses
where required to switch to an app. It didn't switch until you released
Ctrl+Alt, so no meaningless topping of X apps until you reach the one
you looked for. A lot more userfriendly I thought, but I ended up not
using it because Ctrl+Alt+Tab is a painful combination ;)

Anyway, enough ranting. What I intended to say is that there's a lot of
things that could be improved in how XaAES handle the keyboard.

1. I wish it could be possible to applications to "subscribe" to
key-combinations. So if I for example wants to re-enable the
task-switcher mentioned above *cleanly* in Taskbar, Taskbar would ask
XaAES to always receive the Ctrl+Alt+Tab combination even when Taskbar
doesn't have keyboard focus. It could optionally ask for this
combination to not be sent to any other apps - or even the XaAES
internal hotkey handler - while Taskbar is running.
2. Allow other hotkeys than Ctrl+Alt-combination. Alt-Tab is a good
example of a useful and familiar combination. Another one is the Windows
key, which both the Milan and Eiffel (and maybe ARAnyM, I don't know)
supports. This could substitute the Ctrl+Alt+Space as well as be treated
as a modifier. Using the Windows-key to access features is much simpler
than Ctrl+Alt, just take a look at how it's done in Unity.
3. Not in XaAES but in the kernel: It would be good with better
Eiffel-support on computers with IKBD keyboards. The Eiffel (and future
clones, I have an AVR-based clone on my desktop now) supports stuff like
temperature monitoring and fan control, this currently requires a
special driver. It would be better to have a clean way of subscribing to
certain IKBD packets so stuff like this can be done properly.

Jo Even