Re: Key bindings proposal

[David Robinow]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Lennart Borgman
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 6:09 PM, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> > I would even guess that most Windows users never use the
>>> > ALT key in a Windows-specific way (except for CONTROL-ALT-DELETE)
>>> > and never use the Window key at all.  For one thing, most are not
>>> > programmers (another guess), and most interact with Windows using
>>> > the mouse most of the time, not the keyboard.  And
>>> > my guess is that _very_ few (proportionally) users of
>>> > Windows use menu accelerators.
>>>
>>> Here is a lesson from MS on using MS Word:
>>> http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/
>>> work-with-the-keyboard-RZ006078589.aspx?section=9
>>>
>>> It mentions explicitly Alt+Letter.
>>
>> So what?  No one said that menu accelerators do not _exist_.
>> And no one said that Microsoft has no doc describing them.
>
> This is the way MS Word users are educated.
The existence of documentation does not imply that people read it. I
use Word frequently and I've never seen that doc.
 I just looked at a copy of the Word 2003 textbook formerly used at
our local junior college (ISBN 1-4188-3911-6) and in over 600 pages I
see NO MENTION of Alt+Letter usage. I simply don't believe that is the
way most MS Word users are educated.
I've used Windows since 3.1 and I've never used that feature (except
during discussions such as this one where I've tried things just to
see if they work)
Menu accelerators are only useful when one's mouse is broken.
>
> People who are mostly programmers or similar might never learn that
> kind of things. I do not know. But where I was working on the
> technical university people actually wrote a lot of text too. (And
> they used tools like MS Words.)
 Yes, many people use MS Word. That's one of the reasons Bill Gates is
a multi-billionaire. Most of them don't use Alt+Letter.