[Pan-users] Re: Keyboard Shortcut Question

[Duncan]

Kevin Monceaux <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted
below, on  Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:54:10 -0600:

> I finally made the switch from TUI based(I used SLRN for quite a few
> years and then TIN for a little while) to pan.  I've found keyboard
> shortcuts for almost everything I frequently do, except for searching. 
> Is there a keyboard shortcut to switch the focus between the article
> list to the Subject or Author search box, and/or a keyboard shortcut to
> clear the Subject or Author search box?

You should be right at home with pan's scorefile setup if you used slrn! 
=:^)

Pan's keyboard accels are fairly flexible -- they are actually dumped to 
an accels.txt file (in pan's data dir, ~/.pan2 by default, or set by the 
PAN_HOME environmental variable) which you can edit if you like (with pan 
closed, naturally), altho it's an unsorted dump and will return to that 
when pan exits, so you must either use your text editor's search 
functionality or copy it to another file, sort that, and copy it back 
every time you make changes.

That said, the accels are limited to pretty much what's in the menus.  As 
there's no menu entries for searching, there's no accels for the search 
boxes (said without double-checking, but IIRC).  I believe the idea is 
that people aren't expected to be using them for their ordinary task 
flow, only once in awhile, so taking the time to switch to the mouse for 
that, or alternatively, to hit the (shift) tab and arrows the requisite 
number of times, shouldn't be a problem.  Note that if you do use the 
keyboard navigation, the default text in the box is cleared and anything 
you've typed is selected, ready for a single-stroke delete/replace.

If you have so many subscribed groups you have to search on group name, 
you should probably consider using multiple instances (as mentioned, 
using the PAN_HOME variable to point pan at different settings for 
each).  Thus, the only time you'd be expected to use the group search 
would be when checking out new groups to possibly subscribe to -- which 
shouldn't be that often, once you've setup a subscribed list.

The same general idea applies to the article search.  Since you can click 
on a column to sort by it, and you can toggle threaded and view unread 
only on and off as necessary and there's score as well to filter and sort 
by, it's not like article search should be something you use routinely, 
so breaking the flow enough to hit the mouse to select that widget 
shouldn't be a big problem.

Or at least that would seem to be the idea.  However, now that you 
mention it, having a menu item for each of the two search boxes (either 
both under edit, or one each under groups and articles), with a 
corresponding accel either default-mapped or mappable, would make 
keyboard-only navigation MUCH easier.  I can't see how anyone can well 
argue against that, and I expect Charles to be relatively amenable to the 
idea as well.  Thus, I'd suggest doing a bugzilla search to see if 
there's already a bug open requesting it, and if not, creating one.  In 
either case, please post the URL or bug number here and I'll probably CC 
myself and comment that I'd like it as well.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman