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[Request]: Change keyboard shortcuts to more standard
From: |
Zach DeCook |
Subject: |
[Request]: Change keyboard shortcuts to more standard |
Date: |
Sat, 29 Feb 2020 09:50:14 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.4.2 |
> > I don't advocate changing the *main* keystrokes.
> > I just doubt hundreds have internalized ^Q as reverse search.
> Would you have chosen to assign some other function to it?
> If yes, which one?
Wikipedia has a nice table comparing common Desktop Environment keyboard
shortcuts against readline/emacs shortcuts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_key#Table_of_examples
I would say in several cases, the readline/emacs shortcuts have become
more ingrained in me as I used the terminal more and more.
(Also, as background, I have a background using macOS, which keeps many
of the emacs-style shortcuts with control (and uses command for what
other desktop environments use control for)).
Here are my suggestions for the time-being:
* ^Q Quit (exit)
* ^O Open file (read file into new buffer)
* ^Z Undo
* ^Y Redo
* ^F Find (whereis)
* ^X not bound
* ^V not bound
* ^W not bound
And the following, non-standard-but-similar-enough shortcuts should be:
* M-Z Suspend (like ^Z)
Probably the most controversial change here is ^F and ^W
^F is "Forward one character" in readline, and many nano users (myself
included) have muscle memory for ^W (whereis), However, most interfaces
use ^F for Find (though many also use the vi-like /).
I think this change is necessary as users coming from a desktop
environment associate ^W with "Close window". With the current (nano
4.8) behavior, pressing ^W not only does *not* close the window, it also
deactivates the shortcut needed to close the window (instead, you need
to trigger cancel first).
Unbinding ^X and ^V have similar motivations: desktop environment users
expect them to cut and paste, but their current behavior is jarring.
Changing ^X to cut would hurt users familiar to nano, so unbinding is
best. Current behavior of ^C is not jarring, so it doesn't need to change.
Setting M-Z to Suspend (removing toggle suspension) is very logical.
Users who like to suspend are already using it (M-Z ^Z) to suspend, and
the toggle seems to only exist so that desktop environment users aren't
frightened when what they thought was "undo" made everything disappear.
This leaves us with the following 'issues'
* ^B "Backward one character" is not parallel with ^F
* ^Y and ^V no longer do pageup and pagedown
* writeout is no longer bound
The first two aren't too much a concern for me. I usually use a keyboard
with easy access to home, end, pageup, pagedown and the arrow keys (it's
more comfortable to use them than ^B ^F ^N ^P ^Y ^V).
I can see how writeout could be useful, so something would need to be
chosen for that (but for most users, ^S Save is sufficient).
-Zach
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