Stack & Tile overrides shortcuts used by applications

[jscipione]

Stack and Tile currently uses Option+left and Option+right arrows to switch to the left and right tabs in a tab group and Option+Up and Option+Down to switch between next and previous window groups. These shortcuts are already being used by applications so may not be used by S&T.

The application that I noticed this on was Eddie, a text editor for BeOS which uses option+left to move back a word and option+right to move forward a word. When I include an Eddie window in a tab group these shortcuts are overridden.

Alternatives might include Ctrl+Alt+[left,right,up,down]-arrows or perhaps option+tab for next tab, option+shift+tab for previous tab, option+pgup for previous window group, option+pgdn for next window group provided that those shortcuts are not also used by applications.

[jscipione]

Fixed description, should have previewed before submitting.

[siarzhuk]

So much the worse for Eddie. :-) AFAIR it is legacy, abandoned and closed-sources software - I see no big reasons to break the perfection of S&T in favour of obsoleted stuff.

[jscipione]

Replying to siarzhuk:

So much the worse for Eddie. :-) AFAIR it is legacy, abandoned and closed-sources software - I see no big reasons to break the perfection of S&T in favour of obsoleted stuff.

It is still IMHO the best text editor available on Haiku. Besides Eddie is but one example. I hope it is not the general view of the developers that breaking existing applications is okay. This is a bug and should be treated as such.

[tangobravo]

Fully configurable shortcut handling is something is waiting for R2 (and even then I suspect it won't be possible to add that support to legacy applications). Perhaps S&T shortcut could be configurable in time for R1, for any users of applications that suffer a clash. I don't think the goal should be to find an entirely non-clashing combination though.

Stack-and-tile is a new system-wide feature and it needs a good shortcut. IMHO we can't simply try to find a shortcut that no old third-party applications have ever used. Such a search is unbounded ("ah, look at this HelloWorld app I just found from my old BeOS partition that uses ctrl+alt+left to say Hi - we must again reassign the S&T shortcuts"), and the resulting shortcuts will be inelegant (simply by virtue of the fact that no one in BeOS history has chosen them as a good key combination).

[siarzhuk]

Replying to jscipione:

Replying to siarzhuk:

So much the worse for Eddie. :-) AFAIR it is legacy, abandoned and closed-sources software - I see no big reasons to break the perfection of S&T in favour of obsoleted stuff.

It is still IMHO the best text editor available on Haiku. Besides Eddie is but one example. I hope it is not the general view of the developers that breaking existing applications is okay. This is a bug and should be treated as such.

Yes, agree, it was the best more than 10 years ago when I have used it for writing usb_scsi for BeOS. ;-) But the author, unfortunately, decided to abandon the BeOS version and now it has no future on Haiku platform. From the other side I have never used S&T so I have no personal reasons to take care about it but I just noted that introducing more complicate shortcuts because some forgotten software has "reserved" it a decade ago is not good idea. S&T exists on Haiku already for years and its users base is much bigger than Eddie's one, IMHO. We have to look to the Future not the Past, even if the past war brilliant.

PS: May be somebody can ask Pavel about open-sourcing the BeOS version? ;-)

[jscipione]

IMHO we can't simply try to find a shortcut that no old third-party applications have ever used. Such a search is unbounded ("ah, look at this HelloWorld app I just found from my old BeOS partition that uses ctrl+alt+left to say Hi - we must again reassign the S&T shortcuts")

Suggesting that opt+arrows as a minor feature used by a one-off HelloWorld app is disingenuous at best. Opt+arrows performing word-wise selection is a common BeOS idiom used by text editors and word processors. These shortcut are also used by Pe and Productive at least in addition to Eddie. There are most likely more examples and future apps should have access to use this idiom as well, it should not be sacrificed for a minor feature of S&T. Simply put: these shortcuts are already taken by apps, we'll need to choose others.

I thought my suggestion of using opt+tab and opt+shift+tab for previous tab and next tab respectively was pretty good since similar idioms exist elsewhere for example control+tab and control+shift+tab cycle between next and previous applications. Opt+tab seems to already be used to cycle the selection of some but not all controls, perhaps that can be reassigned. Opt+tab is a logical alternative especially because tab == Window tab is an easy connection to make. My suggestions of opt+pgup and opt+pgdn seem to be also taken by Eddie as well as opt+home and opt+end so I'm not sure what to do there.

Fully configurable shortcut handling is something is waiting for R2.

I'm not interested in vaporware solutions. Perhaps this is a good idea for R2 but in the meantime the shortcut needs to be changed to reverse the current damage.

PS: May be somebody can ask Pavel about open-sourcing the BeOS version?

I asked him if he would be interested in updating Eddie for Haiku and he kindly replied that he is interested in Mac OS X now since that is what he uses and he continues to update the OS X version. We already have a decent open source text editor -- Pe. It simply needs to be updated to match Eddie's features and fix it's bugs and irregularities.

[siarzhuk]

Replying to jscipione:

Opt+arrows performing word-wise selection is a common BeOS idiom used by text editors and word processors. These shortcut are also used by Pe and Productive at least in addition to Eddie. There are most likely more examples and future apps should have access to use this idiom as well, it should not be sacrificed for a minor feature of S&T.

In such case I tend to agree with you, that it is a bug. Thank you for the explanation.

[axeld]

The option key was never a system reserved modifier in BeOS or Haiku, so I agree with tangobravo that it does not make much sense to search for an unused shortcut. There probably is none.

Instead, I would suggest a dual approach:

1. Switch to acceptable shortcuts that are not known to be used by any important application. John's suggestion might be a good choice, I don't know.
2. Add a "Stack & Tile" tab to the Appearance preferences application, and let the user choose between a selection of shortcuts. It's not a good solution, mind you, but it's the only way to make sure to please every application and user out there without going the full way and implement a configurable shortcut system.

[humdinger]

Replying to jscipione:

I thought my suggestion of using opt+tab and opt+shift+tab for previous tab and next tab respectively was pretty good since similar idioms exist elsewhere[...]

I think this would be a good solution. Using the tab key to cycle to tabs fits nicely.
The current collision with OPT+left/right word-wise-jumping is bad, because that now only works as long as you don't have s&t'ed windows.