Escape to close a window?

Posted May 14, 2009 11:52 UTC (Thu) by ketilmalde (guest, #18719)
In reply to: trying to fix it by yvesjmt
Parent article: Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks

I'm puzzled, why do you need/want yet another key binding to close windows? And why should applicaitons have specific, incompatible bindings for the same functionality? This isn't Windows, you know, this is and should be handled by the window manager. I've always closed Tomboy notes the same way I close any other window - Meta-Shift-C.

I realize that various applications want me to use Shift-Ctl-W, ESC, or Alt-F4 - it never occured to me that anybody thought this was a good thing.

Escape to close a window?

Posted May 15, 2009 2:47 UTC (Fri) by zenaan (guest, #3778) [Link]

Close-Window I guess is about as "standard" as it gets for "windowing" environments, so I have to agree.

Perhaps there's a bit of a slippery slope for what is a "standard windowing system" keybinding vs what is "application specific" keybinding?

For example with some applications, zoom in and out is CTRL-+ and CTRL--, like with Firefox. But with GIMP, it's just + and -. Yet for the "graphics/ web developer" + and - would probably be the more "standard". Should "zoom" be a window manager standard 'event'.

I vote +1 for window manager/ desktop-environment 'zoom' event.

I guess someone ought to raise the matter with freedesktop.org to discuss such things.

Many UI gripes (inconsistencies) can be levelled at the libre desktops these days, but it's getting better each year (eg OpenOffice writer, at least the version I've got installed which may have been native download, therefore not a 'packaged for my distro' version, does not honour my system/ gnome setting for external application 'Browser' - instead, oowriter always opens up firefox when I click a link. And I couldn't google any way to change this behaviour, so I currently guess it is compiled in).