The space bar keystroke should be assigned to play/stop

[David Corrales]

Right now, the space bar toggles the last selected control. It should be assigned to starting/stopping playback for usability issues.

[David Corrales (davidcorrales)]

Due to design issues, it's not possible (or at least not documented) to catch the space bar event with the current GTK toolkit.

[Laszlo Pandy (laszlok)]

Wrong, it is possible we just screwed it up in our code. Fixed now.

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Dang, this bug report is ancient!
The 0.13.x series of PiTiVi have this implemented correctly. Since it's python+gtk+gnonlin too, just borrow their code?

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Oh, I need to specify, as this bug annoys me daily, that it should be assigned to play+pause instead of play+stop in my opinion.

[Laszlo Pandy (laszlok)]

If it actually is implemented correctly, then yeah we can use the code. I'll take a look at it.

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Well, implemented correctly from the "user's point of view", don't know
about the beauty of the code ;) they did have to add an exception somewhere
to prevent it from being used in areas other than the timeline (such as
toolbars and the source list), though.

[Michael Sheldon (michael-sheldon)]

We already have the "p" and "r" hotkeys for playing and recording; space
is currently used for performing splits via the keyboard.

Laszlo Pandy wrote:
> If it actually is implemented correctly, then yeah we can use the code.
> I'll take a look at it.
>

[Laszlo Pandy (laszlok)]

What i meant by "correctly" is that it is fairly straight forward to bind an application global keypress of space to play/pause. The difficult part is making sure you don't make the application totally unusable to people without a mouse. Space is used to activate the focussed element, like a button, or even to so splits when the waveform has focus as Michael mentions.

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Shouldn't it be reversed? Spacebar for playback control is 1) much more
common in all the video/audio editors I've seen 2) used much more often than
splitting. Splitting could be assigned to the 'S' key or something.

[Laszlo Pandy (laszlok)]

Even if we change the splitting function that does doesn't solve the problem of keyboard only users using spacebar to click the focussed button.

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Yeah, spacebar should work only when the timeline is focused and not a
regular gtk widget (afaict that's how PiTiVi behaves).