On Friday 08 October 2010 18:01:37 Rodney Baker wrote:
Just about everywhere else that I've come across CTRL-Click (for selecting a non-contiguous range of files) and SHIFT-Click (for selecting a contiguous range) are long-time accepted conventions that are well understood by anyone with a modicum of gui experience. OK, they may not be the most efficient paradigm but they are the most common. Changing that for the sake of change leads to confusion and frustration.
Don't SHIFT and CTRL work in KDE for selecting multiple files?
Having said that, I *like* KDE 4 and have been using it since 4.0.4 (and exclusively without recourse to 3.x since 4.1.x). I just think some of the default settings are opposite from what they should be, but it's not worth bitching about. Even Windows allows you to change the behaviour from double to single click for launching (ever since they introduced the "web desktop" somewhere around Win 98 - it just wasn't the default mode of operation.
So if you set your KDE to double-click mode it will still start the object if you click on it once?
BTW, we still have Tab, Ctrl-Tab, Alt-Tab and Shift-Tab that all do pretty much the same things as they did back then for moving around between tabs, windows, panes, menus, selecting from lists etc. without using the mouse. That is another reason why the Ctrl-click and Shift-click hung around for so long, because Ctrl+Space (or Ctrl-+ and Ctrl- -)and Shift-Up/Down did selection long before mice came along, so keeping the same modifiers for use with the mouse made sense then.
The "+" is just a add-on, such as the expose effect for ALT+Tab etc.
Another thing - for most operations, even with a gui, a touch typist will be much faster on the keyboard using shortcuts than by moving one hand to the mouse. All the more reason to maintain consistency of modifier functions between kb and mouse modes of operation.
Maybe there aren't too many touch typists among the KDE devs, though - KDE 4 seems to be much more mouse-bound than earlier de's which isn't necessarily A Good Thing(TM).
Just my $0.02AUD worth (which is worth a bit more than it used to be given the current strength of our currency ;-) ). I'll go back and lurk in the corner now :-).
CTRL + SHIFT do work the same as they did before. It is just that selecting now also works with the "+". The only thing that changed is that clicking next to the object's name does not focus it. And as I stated before, this is AFAIK a Qt4 feature thus not the KDE people chose it. they chose the "+" as an additional way to select in order to not have to learn the use of CTRL in that context. Sven -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org