[Pan-users] Re: [.97] Some usability issues

[Duncan]

Charles Kerr <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 16 May 2006
10:07:07 -0500:

> IMO the right fix is to allow users to customize
> their keystrokes.

Yea! =8^) 

Good point about the confusion if other defaults are chosen, too.  I don't
use that much GTK/GNOME, preferring KDE with the almost sole exception of
PAN, but having arrows move around the GUI while +/- toggle tree expansion
is the near universal norm at least for GUI apps (including MSWormOS,
with its market share), AFAIK, and it would be confusing indeed to reverse
them, without an extremely good reason to do so, anyway. (Having arrows
change the tree sounds much closer to the links/lynx text browser thing --
text mode interface as opposed to GUI conventions. IMO of course.)

Customizable hotkeys, tho...  Well, I use KDE, which makes the feature
virtually universal, and absolutely take advantage of it.  What can I say?
In the case of previous PAN versions, I can say from experience there are
very few other features that can so affect usability, from my perspective.
After PAN switched to GTK2 with PAN 0.12, and lost the ability to
customize hotkeys until the feature was re-added, I seriously considered
dumping PAN, despite it otherwise being the best solution available for my
uses.  Had it not brought the feature back, I probably would have done so,
eventually anyway, as it simply wasn't very useful to me in the default
form.  (It's a testament to how far PAN has come that I haven't had the
same problems with the 0.9x series.  However, I'm not using the new one
for binaries yet, partly because I don't do binaries as much as I used to
so haven't bothered trying yet, and the text shortcuts are close enough
that I've adapted, on them.)



-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman