Pet peeve of the week: keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts are meant to be convenient. That’s why there’s things like the HIG defining common shortcuts so that you can use Ctrl+N practically everywhere and it’ll do what you’d expect. Unfortunately things don’t work quite that smoothly when things aren’t in the HIG.
Take for example Jump to Next Unread Message functionality you can find in Evolution, Pan, and Liferea, among others. Every one of them is using different keyboard shortcut for the same thing. Hardly convenient in a desktop environment. Evolution with its single-key (,
and .
) shortcuts wins here, the combination of Jump to Next and Jump to Previous Unread Message is most convenient. Pan also has single-key shortcuts (P
and N
) but the combination is more awkward.
Another interesting functionality is zooming. The HIG defines Ctrl++ for Zoom In. The Control key is presumably there to avoid disturbing text input as well as accidentally activating some actions. But if you can’t actually enter any text, why require the use of the Control key? Single-key shortcut would be more convenient. It’s not like it would be terribly surprising if +
zoomed in, though it would be surprising if Ctrl++ didn’t.
As an exercise to the reader, try zooming in/out with and without Control in different applications, such as eog, Evolution, Galeon, Gnumeric, and gThumb. The results aren’t exactly consistent, I’d say.
I know I should probably be submitting bugs, but it’s rather surprising to see the maintainers apparently not noticing these things.
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