Ph.D. Candidates and Note Anarchy

[A Borg]

On 17.12.2004 at 12:28  Alfred Lang wrote:

> Timothy Wood wrote:
>
>>   There are many problems with our keyboard shortcut choices for 
>> German and French (and other keyboard layouts too, I'd imagine). This 
>> is something that will receive much more attention as we work on 
>> localizing the application.
>
>
> Please, make the keyboard shortcuts not dependent on localisation. I 
> use an English System and a Swiss keayboard but I am writing both in 
> English and in German. So the shortcuts mut remain independent of the 
> language for whoever is writing in more than one language. I'd prefer 
> an option table where I could enter any key combination or any command 
> on a give computer with any specific keaboard.
> Alfred

I think this points to a related but different problem/feature: The 
mnemonics of keyboard shortcuts.
Nice example: in dialogs where you are asked "save document before 
quitting?", you often have two
buttons named "Don't save" and "Save". Hitting cmd-D activated the 
first button.
Now in German, this corresponds to "Nicht sichern" and "Sichern", but 
the cmd-D prevails. There are
a few applications which change this to cmd-N, but I constantly mishit.

Therefore I am with Alfred here to not (or with great care) localize 
the shortcuts itself.

The main problem though still stands: Often used US shortcuts (e.g. 
with characters like [,],{,},\,/,
comma, semicolon etc.) are at arkward positions or even unreachable 
(try cmd-opt-{ when printing {
alone needs the opt-key), and should be configurable, or keyboard 
layout sensitive.

Cheers, Kei.