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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Accelarator keys and KMenu (was Re: Recently used programs)
From:       David Goodenough <david.goodenough () btconnect ! com>
Date:       2003-08-06 8:51:38
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On Monday 04 August 2003 14:46, Christoph Niemann wrote:
> Hello,
>
> in the Relevantive usability study, the "last recently used programs"
> entries in the KMenu has been turned off. The reasoning was that:
>
>   (a) the difference between the 'last recently' part and the static part
> of the menu was not clear and confused the users and
>   (b) some menu entries showed up two times which led to unwanted
> complexity. [p19, German report, rough translation]
>
> This has been reported as bug #61978 which has later been marked as
> duplicate of bug #61488. The proposed solution is a two column menu with
> one static column and one column displaying the most recently used
> programs.
>
> The questions are:
>   - What should happen with the "recently opened documents" entry and all
>     the other dynamic entries?
>   - Is a double column menu a good idea altogether?
>   - If it is, which column should be right, which should be left?
>
>
> Greetings,
> Christoph

On a related subject, since the introduction of accelarator keys for KDE menus
there is a useability problem with recently used programs.  They destroy the
predictability of the accelartors.  If you use a problem for a while which
happens to use a key that use also use to refer to another program, suddenly
a key sequence stop working.  It would be better if either the recently used
programs were excluded from the accelarator list (I do not know if this is
even possible) or if they were given numbers rather than letters (yet I know 
that could interfere with entries which have numbers, but those are (in my
experience) only used to force the order in which items are found.

Two other points about accelarator keys and KMenu:-

1)  If I am on an entry that start with say an O, and I press O again, should
it not find the NEXT entry that starts with an O, not the same one again.

2) Some packages (for example Open Office) have all their entries starting
with the same letter, this makes the accelarator scheme useless.  Should
these packages have bugs reported against them?

David

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