GTK+ 2.8.0 released

Posted Aug 16, 2005 3:47 UTC (Tue) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

Xaw uses ^A, ^B, ^F, ^D, ^V, M-v, ^E, ^N, ^P as Emacs bindings, ^H as delete, and has no use for ^W or ^U at all. Interestingly enough, ^S and ^R activate text search and replace, which has proven quite handy in some Xaw applications like xpostit.

Tk uses the same bindings, except that it doesn't seem to respond to M-v, ^S, or ^R.

Motif uses...none of these AFAICT--not even ^H--they all seem to insert non-printing characters.

Readline (which is *NOT* an X toolkit) uses the above bindings, except ^S and ^R are incremental searches, plus ^W (delete previous word) and ^U (delete to beginning of line).

epic (a TTY-based IRC client) responds to ^A, ^D, ^E, ^F, ^N, and ^P as in Emacs, but ^B and ^W insert special characters. ^U is delete-entire-line, not delete-to-beginning-of-line. How nice that it supports forward-character but not the symmetrical backward-character!

The Linux kernel TTY driver is usually configured to accept ^H or Del as delete, ^W as delete-previous-word (where "word" means something slightly different from Readline), ^U is delete-entire-line, and ^D is EOF. None of the other bindings mentioned so far (^A, etc) do anything other than insert themselves.

Emacs of course *defines* the meanings of ^A, ^B, ^D, ^E, ^F, ^N, ^P, ^V, etc. Emacs also has keys bound to ^W and ^U, but they mean very different things than they do in Bash, a number of other X applications, and Unix TTYs. These bindings are quite possibly older than Unix.

Several popular applications that originated on or were ported to Unix (e.g. Netscape) do support Readline-like key bindings, despite the fact that they were based on toolkits previously mentioned here (e.g. Motif).

GTK-1 applications supported mostly Bash-like key bindings, but without the search functions. In addition, GTK-1 file open/save dialogs supported filename autocompletion with Tab, which is *really* nice. Modern GTK-2 file open/save dialogs support similar completion, but needing more keystrokes. For several months in GNOME's history, the Tab key just selected the next field.

The application I am using now (Galeon) supports almost none of these bindings, even when typing text into a text widget. I'm not sure why the Galeon developers think I might want ^B to open the bookmarks editor window in the middle of this sentence, but it does.

Personally, I really miss the GTK-1 application bindings, but I'm offended by the GTK *transition* more than the actual binding set at any instant in time. GTK-1 had IMHO the best combination of useful editing primitives with default key bindings, which made GTK-1 applications very attractive to me at the time.

I used to use a lot of GNOME applications, back when GNOME 1.4 was current. For reasons I still don't understand, the GTK and/or GNOME people decided to make sweeping, backward-incompatible changes that removed features from user-visible parts of GTK/GNOME programs, and they called this forward progress. It was almost as bad as being forced to use Windows in terms of features that just disappeared one dist-upgrade. Some of those features have returned, but not all, and many are often buried behind something that looks and feels like the Windows registry editor.

Today, I no longer trust GNOME to provide usable tools as I once did. I used to simply choose from one of the several GNOME 1.4-based alternatives (usually directly from the GNOME menu), and didn't really look for other software if my immediate needs were adequately satisfied. Now it's the other way around--I look everywhere *except* GNOME and/or GTK for various applications, and I apply a small but non-zero negative bias to GNOME or GTK-based candidates where competing implementations exist.

My trust in the GNOME organization was completely destroyed by that organization's behavior in the past. For all I know, next week they'll decide that GTK/GNOME 2.x was a bad idea too, and they'll discard it like they did 1.x. It seems to me that I shouldn't waste my time with their potentially-soon-to-be-unsupported software. I don't know how long it will last, and it seems I cannot rely on the rest of the open-source community to take over if the central GNOME organization fails again.

What really baffles me is that the GNOME maintainers and their apologists don't seem to *get* this. It's not about key bindings, it's about alienating your existing users to benefit users you don't have yet. It reminds me of that fable about the dog, a bone, and the dog's reflection in the river...