A word about the new keyboard shortcut setup in Opera 9.5 alpha
Published September 4th, 2007 7:05 AM EDT By Daniel GoldmanWith the release of Opera 9.5 alpha, we’ve made some changes to the keyboard shortcuts. Read all about it in Rijk’s blog post.
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using
and why wasnt that done with a simple text files, containing OLD, new, and new-with-single-shortcuts keyboard layouts?
adding a new interaface option was a costly programming-wise decision, much faster, cheaper, and without any risk of introducing new bug it could have been done with existing functionality simple as providing more than one keyboard layouts in the install package. and yes, few kB more, and i think it is worth that few kilos
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I’m fully agree with sid.
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TOTALY agree with Sid. Why should I relearn the shotcuts I been using for a few years now?
(using FF on a clients PC, won’t happen again
)
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I agree with Sid, too
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sid, the checkbox was introduced precisely because the developers wanted to avoid having to ship with multiple setup files. It was not a costly exercise. We already had support for ‘conditional’ items in the setup files, to make some shortcuts apply to specific operating systems. This checkbox leverages that support, so it is just a few lines of code and single new line in the dialog.ini.
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but from user standpoint providing 3 keyboard layouts to choose is MUCH better and easier than what was implemented.
i dont like 9.5 layouts, applying 70 or so changes to bring it back to ‘normal’ is tedious and angries old users. all this mess could have been avoided simply providing us an option - old layout (that was close to being perfect) new single, new non-single
is really that hard to include 2 new files in ‘keyboard’ folder in my profile after instalation? from user standpoint, and it is a point that matters, having them is in EVERY way better than this interface option. you can even rename them to be like opera 9.23, opera 9.50 - to avoid translation issues.
im quite amused, that what opera excels about recently is removing features and limiting user choices for no reason. but market will judge.
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“but from user standpoint providing 3 keyboard layouts to choose is MUCH better and easier than what was implemented.”
Yes, ANYTHING is easier than a simple checkbox. Agree completely.
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Yeah, if it only the checkbox was enough, but it doesn’t cut it.
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Having this checkbox and advanced fieldset for managing different keyboard setups side by side is just illogical.
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Oh, gawds. Way to break the Huffman coding of the shortcuts. Are the UI guys at Opera fans of Emacs by any chance?
If you’re going to change this much, have a /real/ go at it. Rip out /all/ the shortcuts. Put back those which you need for consistency with browsers in general. Now, take the precious, *precious* fewest-keys shortcuts—F keys, those which use only a single meta-key, etc.—and bind them to any lonely most-used and most-needy shortcuts. (Why has “paste and go”, for example, gained an extra meta qualifier? Its only reason to exist is that it’s less keyboard work than ^V+Enter!) Then back this out, so that the tools stuck with Ctrl-Shift-Alt-Cokebottle-J are the ones you hardly ever want to do anyway.
Don’t be afraid to burn two keys on one action. If every other browser uses Ctrl-L for “address bar”, don’t take my F8 away unless you can show me that there’s something in greater need of an F-key. If your keybinding system can’t link multiple events to one action, I’m afraid you’re going to have to improve it to ever fix this properly.
FataL: Indeed; the checkbox is not orthogonal to the list in terms of effect, but is in terms of UI. This is horribly nonobvious. Bad, bad, bad.
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I’m going to agree with the other posters here in that it’s going to be annoying having to relearn all the old shortcuts and that many are now mapped to much more inconvenient key combinations.
At the very least we can still remap everything ourselves with Tools->Preferences->Shortcuts->Keyboard Setup right? Opera 9.5 has some cool new features but this really isn’t one of them.
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This is bloody annoying and irritating. Anyone has a guide on how to revert keyboard shortcuts as before?
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The old keyboard-setup like in 9.23 is stored in defaults-folder in your installation dirrectory:
standard_keyboard_compat.ini
copy it to your keyboard folder in your profile. Then choose it in tools > preferences > advanced > shortcuts.
Thats all