[sugar] replace/normalize some keyboard shortcuts

Eben Eliason eben.eliason
Tue Apr 29 19:06:12 EDT 2008


On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 5:17 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com> wrote:
> > I don't expect kids to have more than half a dozen or so activities
>  > running at once.  Cycling around wouldn't be the end of the world.
>
>  [I have not yet found an acceptable multi-screen replacement for
>  Terminal.]  Given the small OLPC screen, what I do is start two
>  instances of Terminal - then use one to "read" information (i.e.,
>  for 'reference') and the other to "write" what I'm working on (i.e.,
>  for 'output').  This usually involves a lot of navigating back and
>  forth between these two Terminal instances.  "Cycling around" seems
>  very cumbersome (and it actually is time-consuming).  Maybe one of
>  these years I'll write some scripts to 'select' each instance, then
>  attach them to keyboard keys.  That should give me good "operator
>  performance" - a single keypress and I get to a specific instance.

Another shortcut I very much hope to add (can someone comment on how
easy this would be?) is alt-backtick ((`), tilde (~), minus shift) for
cycling through all instances of the currently selected activity.
This would allow you to, for instance, toggle back and forth between
your two terminal instances regardless of how many other activities
you had running.

Another discussion this revisits is which method we desire to
implement for alt-tab cycling.  The current implementation simply
cycles through activities in the order in which they were launched,
and that order never changes.  The more common approach is to keep a
stack from which you can pull out arbitrary elements and then push
them on top when they are focused.  This means that alt-tab always
cycles through the list in the order of last use instead, allowing
ping-pong navigation between the two at the top of the stack.  This
has some great usability advantages, but is tricker to fuse with the
arrangement of icons in the Frame (we intended to have alt-tab reveal
the Frame so that it was possible to see the running activities while
switching through them), since they rearrange themselves.  A short
animation of this rearrangement, such that activities are ordered by
last use, with the active/most recent at the far left, is something
we've considered, but not decided upon.

- Eben



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