Subject: quick break insertion (was Re: Commit: some of Jared's UI suggestions)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Mon Aug 13 2001 - 12:17:13 CDT
At 08:55 AM 8/13/01 +0200, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
>According to Martin Sevior <msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au>:
>> Well the current data set is me, Jarad and Tim. What would be easier for
>> you? :-)
>>
>> Having just spent a lot of time inserting section breaks, I'm quite sure
>> the cascading menu thing would be faster and easier for me.
>
>Is there a keyboard shortcut to insert breaks ? If no, you know where you
>have to go :-)
Bingo. I admire the creativity of all the proposals being floated on this
thread, but I'm with Hub here.
If you want to optimize the UI for ultra-rapid access to very commonly-used
operations (such as line and page breaks), that's a logical place for
keybindings. That's why most of those had already been committed by October
1998 (rev 1.3), with simple section breaks getting added as "late" as
February 1999 (rev. 1.20):
http://www.abisource.com/bonsai/cvslog.cgi?file=/abi/src/wp/ap/xp/ap_LB_Defa
ult.cpp
Note that only the more complicated variants of section breaks don't have
keybindings already -- but that makes sense for two reasons:
1. Unless you're developing or testing the feature, those variants are
*very* rarely used.
2. The differences between them are subtle enough that they *beg* to be
explained, and a dialog is a much easier place to get help in a UI than some
pull-right menu.
In short, all we need to do here is follow standard GUI design practices:
- use the keyboard for quick access to high-frequency tasks
- use dialogs for easy discovery & explanation of the same functionality
Does that make sense?
Paul,
GUI hacker
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