If there are any liferea developers at GUADEC, I’d like to have a few words about the key bindings used in your application – specifically why did you choose Ctrl+N for “go to new item” and why Ctrl+W doesn’t close the window.
Please, don’t let me patch your application in order to behave sanely.
You can easily recognise me: I’m the one hopelessly trying to read new items using Ctrl+] and trying to close the window using Ctrl+W.
And while you’re at it, please make Strg+R reload the feeds, like every other app does.
Here Here!
I was using liferea to validate my new feed,
and even did a little patch so updates were
handled correctly, which was promptly accepted:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/patches/liferea-1.0.14-update.diff
Anyway I was very surprised that even cursor
keys to navigate the lists wouldn’t work, nor delete etc.
VERY weird.
Rant on: I hate ctrl+]. I hate it with a passion. Whoever came up with such an utterly useless combination for a common operation?
Did nobody realize that on many international keyboard layouts, [ and ] are commonly relegated either to a shift position or to some AltGr combination? And these shortcuts are (as far as I know) not subject to i18n since they are “available” (for some value of available) on every keyboard.
What about
echo “gtk-can-change-accels=1” >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0
With this, you should be able to redefine shortcuts, and if Liferea devs did it correctly it’ll be saved.
Saving/restoring is done this way:
filename = g_strconcat(g_get_home_dir(), G_DIR_SEPARATOR_S, “.liferea”, G_DIR_SEPARATOR_S, “menurc”, NULL);
gtk_accel_map_save(filename);
gtk_accel_map_load (filename);
AFAIK no Liferea dev will be at GUADEC.
@Tim Fuchs: In the past we had a lot of discussings about the key bindings. The important assumption of Liferea was that you as the user usually do not want to manually update feeds. If at all you will only update a specific feed or a folder of feeds. Of course you can still do it by using the toolbar or the menu options.
And while “update everything” is a rare action, “mark all read” is a very frequently used action. And as such it needs a logical and easy to use hotkey: Ctrl-R.
The decision for Ctrl-N was just because of “N” for “next”. But I see that Ctrl-N for “new subscription” is an important argument. Maybe this is something to discuss. But Ctrl-J is absolutely not intuitive.
Ctrl-Q vs Ctrl-W, there was no specific decision not to support Ctrl-W. Its just that the code Glade2 generates with the default menu option uses Ctrl-Q. Maybe we should ass Ctrl-W as a second option.
@Colin: And finally about the dynamic accelerator binding: it _DOES NOT_ work in Liferea v1.0. The reason is a problem in the Glade2 generated code. We it is enabled it causes crashes. So for v1.1 we did rewrite the menu code using the new GTK menu factories which correctly support the dynamic changing. In v1.1 it will work.