shortcut for center object(s) to page

[Bug Importer]

A shortcut to center the object(s) or group(s) to
page would be really convenient. And if this request
gets through, assign it just one key hit for a shortcut.

Bogdan Oancea

[Buliabyak-users (buliabyak-users)]

It's a one click action in the Align dialog. I don't see why
this, of all align methods, should get a key of its own.

[Gatonegro (gatonegro)]

Buliabyak, it is actually a two-click action: center horizontally plus vertically. It is a more tedious action even because it requires you to bring up the align dialog (Ctrl+Shift+A) and then move the mouse over to where the align buttons are. That time spent moving the mouse around the screen, arranging the dialogs and hunting for the correct button consumes a lot of time when you multiply the few seconds it takes by the thousands of times you use it. It's part of Fitt's Law (the other part being the size of the target: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law) for GUIs.

Why specifically that align method should get a one-key shortcut? Well, mainly because it works that way in Corel Draw, and many new users of Inkscape are used to the Corel workflow. I, for instance, would rather have a one-key shortcut for "center into last selected object", since that is the select action I use the most, but I am sure I can accomodate my workflow to the Corel one.

An improvement on the original proposal: create a one-key center action for "center on page", and variants around it for "center on last selected", "align vertically/horizontally on last selected", "align to the left/right of last selected", etc.

One good candidate to all these keybindings would be the numeric keypad: hit num-0 to center on page, 5 to center on last selected and 1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9 to center in the different coordinates of that last selected element.

[Gatonegro (gatonegro)]

I have considered an alternate solution to this feature: could the "Alignment" actions be exposed through the same system as the shortcuts that are in the XML files to configure keys? That shouldn't be too hard, since all the necessary code is (I pressume?) there, and we (as in the average users) could bind them to whatever keys we want...

Ideally, a way to bind a key to a series of actions (such as KP_5 to "Center horizontally to last selected, Center vertically to last selected") would be wonderful.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Related:
Bug #189535 in Inkscape: “align by keys like (alt-v) vertical align (alt-h) horizontal align”
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/189535>