Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 13:50:45 +0200 From: Stijn Hoop <stijn@win.tue.nl> To: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Recent changes to libdialog are weird Message-ID: <20010917135045.B455@pcwin002.win.tue.nl> In-Reply-To: <95560.1000727060@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za>; from sheldonh@starjuice.net on Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 01:44:20PM %2B0200 References: <95560.1000727060@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za>
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On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 01:44:20PM +0200, Sheldon Hearn wrote: > Recently, libdialog's use of tab, space and enter seems to have changed. > Now, space and enter mean the same thing. Before, enter was a > context-insensitive short-cut to the currently selected dialogue > "submit" button. Yes, and for the better; see below: > What many folks may not realize is that the new behaviour, while "safer" > than what we had before, makes libdialog behave differently from at > least Motif, Windows, JavaAWT, JavaSwing. Eh, no. While it's true that pressing <enter> in a dialog box is commonly recognized as meaning 'use the default button', that's only used if the default button is clearly focused, and when not selecting things in a subframe - in other words, not always. What was wrong in libdialog (and which I and others have been complaining about for a long time) is that while selecting items from lists in subframes you still selected the default button instead of crossing the item in the list. Ditto in other places, where people expected <enter> to select the current item. I can't count the number of times I had to restart selecting things anymore. It isn't just sysinstall either - ports/www/mod_php4, which has a nice interactive menu, also uses dialog(1) which had the same behaviour. I'd like to see the person that intuitively pressed 'space' instead of 'enter' to select an option in that menu. > So what we have now is a libdialog that protects the finger-happy, while > confounding those who expect "pretty standard behaviour". IMHO, you just got used to it. Present the interface to a Windows user who hasn't seen it before and watch them getting frustrated the third time sysinstall asks 'Proceed?' while they tried to select the disk they would be installing on... > I reckon if sysinstall needs to be weird, sysinstall should use its own > weird version of libdialog and leave the distributed libdialog alone. No - I vote to keep the current code. It's made my life easier already. --Stijn -- ] Nothing safer than a 'cat /dev/wallet | grep $price > real-person; \ ] mv $thing-to-buy $my-case I'd prefer 'mv $thing-to-buy $my-case && cat /dev/wallet | \ grep $price > real-person -- Anonymous, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, in message <200108020628.IAA11775@hugo10.ka.punkt.de> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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