[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] key assignment for frame-stepping

[Ville Saari]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2004 at 09:55:07PM -0400, D Richard Felker III wrote:

> > Using punctuation keys for default key bindings is a bad idea because
> > different localized keyboard layouts have a bad habit of moving them
> > around or hiding them under modifier keys.
> 
> the same could be said about letters, since dvorak keymaps have a
> nasty habit of rearranging them so that they're awkward to use as
> control keys... :)

You don't even need dvorak. The german qwerty is actually qwertz!

Awkward yes, but still usable. If you stick with A-Z, then you can be
pretty sure that the key at least exists. The punctuation characters
that have their own keys in US keyboard may disapperar behind shift
or alt in localized keyboards.

The Gimp is the traditional example: its default key binding for zoom
in is "=", which is at shift-zero in my finnish keyboard. Gimp already
uses the shift key for other purposes, so pressing "=" is impossible.

The different version of the same problem appeared in some Mac OS X
application (I don't remember which one) that used some puncuation character
for some operation and shift plus the same key for some modified version
of the same operation. That character happened to already require shift on
my keyboard, so the modified operation would have required "harder" shift.
Pressing both shifts at once didn't help.

IMHO key bindings for the operations that do somethin else than inserting
that particular character to some document should be defined by the position
of the key and not its label. Too bad it's impossible to do portably.

-- 
 Ville