Questions for deployments of GNOME [LWN.net]

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 17:12 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Questions for deployments of GNOME by Los__D
Parent article: Questions for deployments of GNOME

Question: which is better, me cursing the system daily because I can't work out how to make it behave in an intuitive fashion, or the clutter caused by featuritis?

As an example, I grew up with systems where Ctrl-U was delete line, and Ctrl-W was delete word. I expect these shortcuts to work, and made the effort to configure the KDE desktop I use day-in, day-out to match my way of thinking. On GNOME, I can't find a way to make Ctrl-W anything other than Close Window; this may be a case of not enough looking, but I'm not prepared to unlearn the habits of 15 years learning, just because someone, somewhere feels that I shouldn't have them.

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Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 20:24 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (1 responses)

Use emacs keybindings, no problem.

(Yes, some applications have Ctrl-w hardwired to "Close window", that's a bug, but hardly GNOME's fault).

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 22:47 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Even applications like, oh, gnumeric (a flagship GNOME application).

As far as I can tell, menu shortcut keys take precedence over the (fantastically arcane to set up) gtk-emacs-* bindings in every situation (although I haven't yet checked the Gtk source to verify this).

As such, you have to unbind all clashing keybindings in *every application separately* before things work as you expect.

(Oh, and those vaunted Emacs keybindings? You know how many keys they bind? Fifteen. That's pathetic, just pathetic: even readline beats that by a factor of two or three. Not even paragraph moving is implemented.)