From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1N1Kfg-0001b1-FD for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:59:12 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1N1Kfb-0001ZS-IW for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:59:12 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=50752 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1N1Kfb-0001ZN-DH for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:59:07 -0400 Received: from qw-out-1920.google.com ([74.125.92.144]:15206) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1N1Kfb-0005St-2D for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:59:07 -0400 Received: by qw-out-1920.google.com with SMTP id 5so1226374qwc.4 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:59:05 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <4AE1B6A6.3060507@codemonkey.ws> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:59:02 -0500 From: Anthony Liguori MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH] new SDL keyboard shortcuts to start and stop VM References: <5d6222a80910210924j62505b7dtf298754ce65f1c99@mail.gmail.com> <20091021183503.GA27677@shareable.org> <20091022124036.5df991f3@doriath> <4AE07D06.4080205@codemonkey.ws> <20091022143833.51c48260@doriath> <4AE0A535.3000607@codemonkey.ws> <4AE15DFD.6050203@redhat.com> <4AE1974E.5010303@redhat.com> In-Reply-To: <4AE1974E.5010303@redhat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Kevin Wolf Cc: Mulyadi Santosa , qemu-devel@nongnu.org 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