[Pythonmac-SIG] Key Bindings on cross platform apps.

[Christopher Barker]

Jack Jansen wrote:
> There are some apps that have sets of keyboard shortcuts and let you 
> switch between them with a preference. 

Yes, and Peppy is one of them -- one of it's strengths.

> This is very handy, because now a 
> Mac user of application X can chose whether s/he wants Mac-oriented 
> shortcuts (so find will be command-F, for example) and another user of X 
> on the Mac who happens to be familiar with the Windows version of X can 
> chose Windows-X-compatible shortcuts (so find would be F3, probably).

Right. I switch a lot between OS-X, Windows, and Linux a lot. I've found 
that most apps these days follow the same convention for the really 
standard stuff -- cut/copy/paste, save, except that the Mac uses 
"command" where Windows and Linux (which is to say KDE, GNOME, and 
Mozilla) use "control" -- why apple ever even added a control key, 
rather than making command==control, I'll never know. But there you go.

Anyway, to help with that confusion, I've re-mapped my Mac keyboard so that:

key          action
___________________
command   == command
control   == command
caps lock == control

Since CapsLock is evil anyway, I've remapped it to control on Windows 
and Linux also, so I can do the same thing everywhere.

As far as Peppy is concerned, what I want is to have it behave the same 
on all platforms, except using the command key instead of control on 
OS-X. There are two options for doing this:

1) enforce that command==control in Peppy. This is what wx does by 
default if you use the right constants to define your keys

2) have a "Mac" keyboard mapping that is different than the other ones.

I prefer the 1st approach -- it makes it easier have a default set of 
key bindings that is the same everywhere, and easier to move a key 
bindings config file between platforms. I was polling this group to see 
if that approach made sense to others too. It seems it does.

> I don't like customizable keyboard shortcuts in general (this is what 
> makes it impossible to type anything in someone else's Emacs, for 
> example),

I agree -- I found the default emacs bindings painful enough that I've 
added my own, but now I can hardly use emacs if I don't have my own 
config for it.

-Chris

-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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