just to say, "yeah, what he said" ;)

seriously though, i have real trouble remembering to use shft+crtl+z instead of ctrl+r, it's mainly habit, but it is also the fact that i find the old method more comfortable.

the only place Ctrl+ r gets me into trouble is Mozilla, when editing an email i ocasionaly refresh the page by accident, thanks to my painfully slow connection i can sometimes stop it before it gets anywhere though :P

i'm sorry if i've missed large parts of this thread, my hotmail address is under attack from a worm, so i don't receive a lot of mail(other than "security updates") at the moment :(

Phil.

From: Nathan Carl Summers
To: usr352@wanadoo.es
CC: David Neary , Branko Collin , Gimp Developer List
Subject: Re: [Gimp-developer] Redo shortcut (was: Undo shortcut) Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 09:50:58 -0700 (PDT)

/me returns from the hurricane, finally able to catch up on several days worth of email.

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 usr352@wanadoo.es wrote:

However I *love* the Ctrl-R binding, especially because it lets me

quickly

compare the done and undone versions of an image using a single hand

with

very little effort. Try to do it with Ctrl-Z/Shift-Ctrl-Z and you'll

find

that you need either very good coordination between fingers (better than

the

one I have at least) or to use both hands.

I agree. Gimp's undo and redo feature differs from many other programs in that when comparing subtle changes it is useful to switch rapidly between the "before" and "after" views, while for a program such as a word processor, that is probably not a useful thing to do. This being the case, this particular need of GIMP users was probably not considered by the HIG.

Personally, I compare between the "before" and "after" by holding down control and hitting z or r as necessary. For some changes, I switch several times a second, as the human eye is remarkably able to detect small differences when they are animated.

Switching between views this fast with accuracy is simply not possible using Shift-Ctrl-Z due the the physiology of the human hand. The optimal hand position is left on the shift and control and right on the z, with the finger on the shift moving every other beat of the other hand and the finger on the control key staying still.

Here the body's natural cordination works against switching views quickly, as the nervous system will assume that the finger on the R key and that on the shift key should really be synchronized. This leads to errors. With the old bindings the natural cordination system helps to acomplish the task accurately and faster.

So, if it's possible to have two different keybindings for the same

command

I'd like very much to have both.

Unfortunately, it is not. Really, GTK should be made more flexable in this regard, but it is not a trival problem, due to how GTK handles accelerators.

Since we only can choose one, it makes sense that we choose the one that ergonomics favors. I'm sure that in this case most usability people would say that actually being able to use the feature is more important than consistancy with some other apps. Especially because this particular funciton isn't particularly consistant between apps.

On the other hand, we could go for both ergonomics and consistency by using MS Office's Ctrl-Y. Note that I am not recommending it. I think keeping redo the way it is in 1.2 is the best policy.

BTW, the mail program I'm using right now (Forte Agent) uses Ctrl-R to

redo.

There we go, between that and tradition, we have all the justification we need. ;)

Rockwalrus