keyboard shortcuts for toolbox

[Formerly Kevin Yin, now disabled]

Proposal: the toolbox dialog has a bunch of tools. It could be beneficial for beginners if every icon in the toolbox had its specific keybind shown in the corner of the icon. This could greatly enhance the ease of adoption. This could be changed through the options.

If this option was implemented, I propose that it be on by default, because it is only negative (if at all) after a user has deeply familiarized himself with Inkscape, in which case he can go to the options and change it.

[Formerly Kevin Yin, now disabled (kyin)]

Summary at bottom.

[22:57] <LiamW> kyin: re 1361020: the tooltips also need to reflect the "easy" tool shortcut
[22:57] <LiamW> Like B vs. Shift+F6
[22:57] <LiamW> Which one would you prefer to key?
[22:57] <kyin> B

[22:59] <LiamW> kyin: furthermore the icons need to be localized too :P
[23:01] <kyin> the shortcuts would not be inherent to the icons
[23:01] <kyin> they would be bound to the shortcut editor, since shortcuts can change
[23:01] <kyin> so it would be display-text-over-icon

[23:02] <LiamW> We push GtkActions into GtkToolbars, they don't like that very much
[23:03] <kyin> I know nothing about GTK so that is as far as my input can go
[23:03] <kyin> well, as for the icons, can't you simply overlay two icons?
[23:03] <kyin> one of the icons will be a dynamically generated text svg
[23:04] <kyin> since you're already displaying icons through svgs
[23:04] <LiamW> You can but you get this horribly aliased GdkPixbuf
[23:04] <LiamW> Looks like shit

[23:04] <kyin> well, you can composite svgs also
[23:04] <kyin> so create the SVG by overlay, then shove that straight into the current display mechanism
[23:06] <kyin> I know that editing icons.svg changes what icons are displayed, so you can generate an intermediate icons_with_shortcuts.svg on Inkscape load/shortcut change, then display that instead.
[23:08] <LiamW> We don't have much control over the rendering of any icon
[23:08] <LiamW> That's why custom gtk themes like Oxygen can override certain Inkscape icons
[23:09] <kyin> that's not really what I'm saying
[23:09] <LiamW> We open up the icons.svg file and ask GTK to make icons accessible for us
[23:09] <LiamW> That comes in the form of GdkPixbuf icons
[23:09] <kyin> ok, imagine renaming icons.svg to raw_icons.svg
[23:09] <kyin> then as Inkscape starts, it produces icons.svg dynamically from raw_icons.svg
[23:10] <kyin> by just adding text in
[23:10] <LiamW> Which takes a 3 second delay i.e. unacceptable
[23:10] <LiamW> Worse the more fonts you have
[23:10] <kyin> ok, then you can precompute it and change it only when the user changes shortcuts
[23:10] <kyin> is the fact that it's loading fonts the problem?
[23:11] <LiamW> Techinically yes but there is nothing left we can do about it
[23:11] <kyin> fonts can also be converted to paths very nicely
[23:11] <LiamW> I already did what was possible without patching GTK to speed launch times
[23:12] <kyin> if you precomputed icons.svg, and used Object to Path, there would be no fonts loaded except when changing shortcuts
[23:12] <kyin> this would add zero overhead except in the case of changing shortcuts
[23:13] <LiamW> That introduces a whole 'nother architectural problem
[23:13] <LiamW> When pushing GtkActions, why should they have to know what a "keyboard shortcut" is?
[23:14] <LiamW> They don't care
[23:14] <LiamW> There's no special way for GtkAction to respond to keyboard events unless triggered by a child widget
[23:15] <kyin> my proposal is limited only to the icon, so the only thing that changes should be the icon display, right?
[23:15] <kyin> I don't see where a GtkAction comes into it
[23:15] <kyin> except when you are rebinding shortcuts, you have to refresh the icon
[23:16] <L...

[su_v (suv-lp)]

One reason the "easy" shortcuts are intentionally not included in the tooltips is their dependency on locale (and Inkscape not maintaining nor managing locale-dependent keymap files): for languages other than English, the current predefined single-key shortcuts are not really "easy" (not based on the translated name of the tool).

Another question is whether such a feature should be provided by the toolkit itself - or why is it that Inkscape would be the only application which requires such redundancy in the default GUI for new users (and thus as requested for _all_ users)?

<opinion>if at all, such a feature should only be shown on demand and on-the-fly, e.g. on a certain keypress</opinion>

[Bart Van Audenhove (bart-vanaudenhove)]

I find this feature unnecessary since the key bindings appear on hovering over the icon?

[Hachmann (marenhachmann)]

I agree with Bart.