Text formatting tools and shortcuts (was: The Inbox: Tools-cmm.826.mcz)

Hi,

following up on the discussion about the strike-out vs.
change-font-size shortcuts:

I do use the strike out shortcut frequently to finish lines in my ToDo
workspace. I would be fine with the font size shortcuts, though, if
there were another easy way to apply the strike out emphasis.

We have a perceived dozen of ways that allow you to change something
about the look of text, accessible via different kinds of interactions
with the world:

- menu item "set font" in tools (allows to change font family and
size), has cmd-k as a shortcut
- menu item "set style" in tools (provides a choice of a subset of
families plus some generic styles like DefaultTextStyle, but I do not
really know how it works), cmd-K
- menu item "set alignment" in tools (choice between leftFlush,
centered, justified, rightFlush, which reads rather technical in the
camel case, doesn't it?), cmd-u
- Morph menu item "text properties..." currently signals a
MessageNotUnderstood: UndefinedObject>>bounds in Morph>>openNear:in:
(world is nil)
- a halo icon indicating "font size" that opens the "set font" dialog from above
- a halo icon indicating "font family" that opens the "set style"
dialog from above
- a halo icon indicating "text style/emphasis" that opens a textual
choice of text styles, including struckOut, and text justification
again (also again in technically looking camel case), have not found a
menu command for this.
- cmd-6 allows you to change the color, add Do Its and links in the
text. Have not found a way to do that from a menu.
- cmd-9 adjusts the kerning (makes the text narrower) and I can not
find the shortcut to make it wider. No menu that I know of does this.
- cmd-0 removes some kinds of text attributes. No menu item.

The third mentioned halo icon works for me to strike out text, but I
have to get the halo of the text morph inside the workspace. And first
I had to find out that the halo icon exists at all because it does not
appear for all kinds of morphs (which is reasonable). I would rather
like to access that from the context menu (or via a shortcut...).

Do we really need a set of different dialogs for all of this? Wouldn't
it be nicer to merge these into one dialog and make the choices read
less technical? Shouldn't all options be accessible in a consistent
way instead of some via menus, some via the halo, some only via the
keyboard?

Is this something we should rather improve instead of disagreeing
about the keyboard shortcuts? Maybe not in 5.2, but later...

I do not see a problem of rededicating shortcut keys per se. If there
is no agreement on whether this is a regression or progress, there is
still the more complex option of making the global shortcuts
configurable or introducing all kinds of preferences for deviations
from the traditional behavior, and adding built-in preference sets
that make your Squeak behave like a legacy version ("Squeak 3.2
compatibility mode"). I would not be a fan of this, though.

Best regards
Jakob


Am 02.07.2018 09:14 schrieb "Tobias Pape" <[hidden email]>: