[Idle-dev] Re: keybindings

[Nicholas Riley]

On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 09:59:55AM -0500, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > Using function keys is especially bad on PowerBooks that don't have
> > separate brightness/contrast/etc controls (everything but Wall
> > Street/PDQ).  A few monthe ago when I was looking at implementing this
> > in my own software I did a survey of a bunch of Mac apps and command-/
> > came out as the consensus for "zoom window".  Most apps have no
> > shortcut at all - that's also a possibility for IDLE.
> 
> Note though that Alt-F2 is not the normal zoom (which does whatever
> the window manager does by default).  It is a special operation that
> keeps the width of the window default (normally 80 columns) but makes
> it maximal vertically.  This is useful to get an overview of a larger
> piece of code.  (I have no use for code wider than 80 columns. :-)

There's no 'normal zoom' on the Mac; window zooming is entirely under
the application's control.  In many applications, the standard window
zoom behaves pretty much like IDLE's "zoom height".  To get a true
full-screen zoom, you hold down the Option key while clicking the Zoom
box.

However, there's no way to intercept normal Mac window zooming with Tk
at the moment - clicking the zoom box does nothing.  This is even true
in Alphatk (which, btw, uses command-/ to zoom :) so I figure if Vince
hasn't been able to find a way around it, nobody can, until Tk is
fixed.

One more Mac-specific problem I noticed in IDLE was the new
Preferences window - it opens centered over the parent window, which
can mean that the dismiss buttons are below the bottom of the screen,
and it's not movable.  If this could be made into a movable modal
dialog, or to use more sensible positioning rules, that would be a
good thing.  Movable modal dialogs do seem possible, as Alphatk uses
them.

-- 
=Nicholas Riley <njriley@uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>
        Pablo Research Group, Department of Computer Science and
  Medical Scholars Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign