Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH] new SDL keyboard shortcuts to start and stop VM

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Well, the whole point of a keyboard shortcut was for me to make things
> easier.

This is something of a classic debate between providing power users 
every possible knob and function verses overwhelming non-power users 
with so many features/options that they cannot even get started.

My big problem with keyboard shortcuts is that they are a really awful 
user interface for anything because they are not discoverable (without 
consulting documentation) and they provide no obvious feedback as to 
what state they are in.

For instance, imagine creating a shortcut based on a monitor macro of 
'migrate "exec:dd of=snapshot.img"' and you tie it to ctrl-alt-e.

What feedback do you get that the command has completed?  What happens 
if you try to run the command again while another is running?  Does it 
get queued, does it get dropped?  I can imagine a user sitting there 
hitting ctrl-alt-e repeatedly not realizing anything is happening.  I 
know I find myself doing this sometimes with ctrl-a when using -nographic.

Your answer may be, this is for a developer and they'll be aware of all 
the short comings/gotchas but this ends up being a rather user-hostile 
interface.  People are never as aware of short comings/gotchas as we'd 
like them to be.  If there was no other way for a developer to do this, 
I'd be more inclined to find a way to support this but it's just a 
matter of writing a script or if you really need a short cut, you can do 
it with standard gnome short cuts or write a very simple vnc client 
based on gvncviewer (we're talking a dozen lines of added code) to do 
this for you.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori