[haiku] Re: Screen preferences usability question: default button for keep settings dialog?

  • From: DarkWyrm <darkwyrm@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:03:33 -0400

Axel Dörfler wrote:
Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 9:18 PM, David McPaul<dlmcpaul@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think Undo should be the default anyway since it is one of those
situations where a positive action could be harmfull.
Exactly.

I disagree. First of all, "escape" is the usual key to press here, and since a garbled (or not visible) screen should only happen very rarely thanks to EDID, it also makes the requester harder to use for most of the cases - where you just want to press "ok". What you achieve with this is that you make the requester unusable via the keyboard for 99% of the use cases. What's wrong with the escape key to abort this thing? Hitting enter in desperation sounds very unlikely to me. And even if this happens, there should be a shortcut to set a fallback resolution that is known to work.
Never underestimate a novice user or cheap CRT monitors. ;-) It may not be as unlikely as you think. I've also used monitors where a particular mode was supported, but it was almost completely unusable.

How about a compromise: defaulting to Undo, but enabling the K key as a shortcut for Keep, similar to the alert StyledEdit has for saving changes before exiting. Keyboarders like myself don't have to grab the mouse or hit the Tab key first, and there's a little extra safety at the same time. If this were something that people do all the time, I'd advocate keeping things as they are.

--DarkWyrm

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