[Development] QKeySequenceEdit questions

Laszlo Papp lpapp at kde.org
Wed May 18 11:50:56 CEST 2022


On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 9:50 AM Volker Hilsheimer <volker.hilsheimer at qt.io>
wrote:

> > On 18 May 2022, at 10:09, Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> wrote:
> >> On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 9:03 AM Volker Hilsheimer <
> volker.hilsheimer at qt.io> wrote:
> >> Have you ever used vim? :P Deleting until the end of the line, or
> deleting the next word, are all multi-chord key sequences.
> >
> > Sure, but in this context, we were discussing shortcut editors that was
> linked in KDE.
> >
> >> > The current proposal is to make QKeySequenceEdit be able to behave
> like a QShortcutEdit by adding a property. But for keyboard shortcuts, "key
> sequence" does not make all that much sense. We are just retrofitting it
> for that purpose, I feel.
> >>
> >> You are not forced to use key sequences with more than one chord, but
> in some applications, such as IDEs, multi-chord shortcuts are pretty
> common, even without using vim mode.
> >
> > We have actually done thorough investigation on this, and the fact is
> that the vast majority of the applications (in fact, everything we could
> find ourselves) use single combination shortcut. It is not really common or
> even practical to have sequences for shortcuts. Please refer to for example
> this for further information:
> >
> >
> https://www.ranorex.info/difference-between-key-sequence-and-key-shortcut-t8864.html
>
>
> That’s one way of defining these terms. VSCode calls things “key
> combination” and “chords”, and “key bindings". Qt calls them key sequence
> and shortcut.
>
> In Visual Studio Code, which I’d consider to be a rather popular
> application, you open the Keyboard Shortcut editor with a sequence of
> Cmd+K, Cmd+S. The “testing.cancelRun” command is then by default (I think,
> mine is somewhat heavily customized, but I don’t think I touched that one)
> bound to the key sequence Cmd+;, Cmd+X, or the “Add Line Comment” command
> is bound to Cmd+K, Cmd+C. Many of the extensions for VSCode use key
> sequences, like “jump to previous bookmark" when you install that extension
> is Cmd+K, J (toggling it is Cmd+K,K).
>
> And you can edit the key sequences there, and end the sequence input via
> Return; which makes it impossible to use Return in a sequence, but you
> can’t have it all, I suppose.
>

The thing, emacs, vim, Visual Code or even QtCreator are development
environments. Most of the apps out there, like ours, are not geeky
development environments. I consider these sort of applications the
minority out there as far as applications go. This is not to invalidate
them. I am just saying that Qt designed this class for these minor use
cases. I would like them to become useful also by the majority.


> QKeySequenceEdit is 330 lines of code, so writing your own that is ideal
> for your use case might sometimes be the best option. And if you have ideas
> on how we can make QKeySequenceEdit more user-friendly without
> categorically constraining existing use cases (Perhaps a property that
> allows defining a “finish editing” key? And/or adding a protected
> finishEditing function that would allow a subclass to handle a specific key
> event to finish editing), then patches welcome.
>

The list of properties that I think a generic hotkey editor would need:

1. Single combination
2. Finishing character
3. No timer! This could be done automatically for keyPressEvent timing. No
need to time again in a custom widget.
4. Allowing Esc to be assigned like in some apps.

I am happy to provide patches for these over some course of time as we have
got requests for all these.

Thanks.
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