hotlist: now with edit

bulia byak bulia at dr.com
Tue Feb 4 23:55:21 UTC 2003


> > 2. (I'd prefer this one) Just remove all hotkeys from the buttons, to
> > aviod any confusion. This is reasonable because the buttons are
> > accessible not only via Tab, but by other keys (that cannot be entry
> > hotkeys anyway):
> 
> I think that would be inconsistent with other dialogs.

Yes, but can we find a solution that would be perfect? I think 
this inconsistency is better than the drawbacks of other approaches. 

> I'm afraid there is no simple solution to this problem.  There is no list
> of currently supported keys and there is no way to test at runtime which
> hotkeys are active.

The letter hotkeys have an advantage of being visible (highlighted). 
But then, we can made other keys that activate the buttons "visible" 
too, e.g.:

[ Edit <F4> ] [ New entry <Ins> ] [ Delete <Del> ]

What would you say? Again this is inconsistent with other dialogs 
but at least it's convenient. 

> Maybe the dialog hotkeys of the dialog should be disabled if they conflict
> with the user entries?  If this happens, the hotkey on the button should
> not be shown.

I thought about this and I think it's a bad idea. Not only it is 
difficult to implement (redrawing the dialog on each add/delete 
entry and on each going into a subgroup), it may be very very 
confusing when (from the user's viewpoint) button hotkeys appear 
and disappear seemingly randomly without any warning or 
explanation. I think most people will consider this a bug.

> > That's too inconsistent. A hotkey's action is to activate an item
> > immediately. It may be utterly confusing when you hit a key but the
> > expected action is not fired only because there's another item with the
> > same hotkey. So I think it's best to prevent duplicate hotkeys from
> > being entered.
> 
> I think it's the right thing to do.  There are duplicates even in the
> English menus.  For example, F9-C-E can be "Free VFSs now" or "Edit
> extension file".  Either the second item should not have its hotkey
> highlighted or the hotkey should move between entries without activating
> them.

OK I'll implement hotkey search so that a duplicate hotkey cannot 
be entered. If it is read in from the file (manually edited), a 
duplicate hotkey is not displayed (perhaps with a warning?).
-- 
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