[Idle-dev] Re: IDLE on Linux

[Mats Wichmann]

I posted last week with some concerns.

A lot of these seem to be conflicts over key bindings,
rather than real "problems", something which occurred
to me about a half-hour after posting - posting a
message seems to be the normal method for breaking a
brain spinlock...

For example, Alt-<x> habitually selects a menu
labelled <x> if a Windows-style interface is being
used.  KDE, of course, tries to present a Windows-
flavored interface, thus the Alt-W problem (as
Guido replied).  This might also be true for CDE,
although I haven't tried it.

Changing the key bindings isn't hard... since they're
localized to a single file.  Picking sensible ones
is somewhat less easy.  I can cerainly fix my
classroom problem by arbitrarily choosing the
bindings I want, and hope that doesn't confuse
folks when they go away to other systems with
different key bindings...

Leading me to today's question:

How did the bindings for "UNIX" get chosen?  what
would make a sensible set, that is not likely to
conflict with existing usage on a reasonable
subset of UNIX machines (certainly including
Linux where Python has the advantage of being
included "standard")?  Is there any way to pick
them so they're even slightly mnemonic (I find
a number of entries in the current set non-intuitive,
personally). Are such questions even answerable,
or worth worrying about?


Mats