I noticed there must be some "best practices" or standards when it comes to describing keyboard shortcuts in text such as in Visual Studio Code.
Where can one find the "standards" for ordering key combinations in keyboard shortcuts?
For instance what is correct order of modifiers?
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/keybindings
Related
One might encounter a video or blog post that identifies Intellij operations by keystrokes in some keymap (which is rarely identified but might be reasonably guessed). This leads to the question: is there a mechanism for mapping a given shortcut and keymap to another keymap/shortcut pair? This seems like a trivial candidate for a plugin if there is no such plugin/mechanism already. For example, a video might show a User typing Command-S on a Mac using the default keymap (for Save All) which maps to Control-X for an Emacs keymap.
When I start IntelliJ IDEA, that message comes up, but I couldn't find any information about that feature and how it could help me.
Enable smart keyboard internalization for IDEA.: We have found out that you are using a non-english keyboard layout.
You can enable smart layout support for German language.You can change this option in the settings of IDEA more...
This dialog has been introduced on Github as fix for IDEA-63779.
It fixes certain keyboard shortcut clashes with non-english keyboard layouts. Cited from IntelliJ support:
This option enables support for certain hotkeys with "de", "fr", "it" and "uk" layouts. Without it some combinations will not work (like AltGr+7 to type "[" with German keyboard).
There are corresponding Linux and Windows issues as well.
There are lots of useful functions of Intellij IDEA and for many of them there are keyboard shortcuts.
But remembering shortcuts may be difficult, at least for me.
Are there some consistent guiding principles by which these shortcuts were selected by designers? I believe learning such principles would be helpful to memorize shortcuts itself.
I think that the closest answer you're going to get is "it depends". Some shortcuts are obviously chosen, because the keybinding describes what the shortcut does, for example ⌘+O means open, not only in IntelliJ but in many places throughout OS X.
Some shortcuts probably don't have any kind of such semantic meaning, such as Alt+Enter and are chosen because they are very frequently used and the placement of the keys relative to each other is comfortable.
Other keyboard shortcuts with similar purpose have the same starting sequence of keys. For instance the extract refactoring shortcuts, which are as follows:
⌘+Alt+M - extract method
⌘+Alt+C - extract constant
⌘+Alt+V - extract variable
⌘+Alt+F - extract field
⌘+Alt+P - extract parameter
So in such case you only need to remember that if you want to extract something, you press ⌘+Alt and the first letter of what you want to extract.
That being said, I don't believe that the way to learning the keybindings is memorizing them, but using them. If you use one keybinding multiple times, over the time you will memorize it. You can help this process for instance by locating the action you want to perform in the menu, but instead of clicking it look at the keyboard shortcut next to it and press it. Or find the action using ⌘+Shift+A, look at the shortcut and use it.
There are even plugins, which can help you with this, for instance Key Promoter which you can install via Settings/Plugins/Browse Repositories. This plugin shows you shortcut you can use when you invoke some actions by clicking it in menu, etc. It also shows you how many times you've used this action in such a way instead of using the corresponding shortcut.
As everybody knows the en-US Keyboard-layout is the best one for programming. So I'd like to use it in my IDEs. But since I live in a non-en-US country I need the de-CH layout for all other applications. Now I wonder if it is possible to set the layout depending to which application currently has the focus. If that is possible, can a human brain adapt to such a behaviour or is it just confusing?
cheers,
AC
The operating system is Windows 7 and the IDEs are VisualStudio and Netbeans
i thought about the same question some time ago, haven't fount an easy solution and so i changed the layout of may PC (where i do mostly programming) to en-US and left my Laptop on de-DE (i'm from germany) - after almost a week i changed back my PC to de-DE because i was confused ll the time...
you should probably mention your operating system and ides. afaik there's an option to make the keyboard layout application specific – so you set it once after starting up your ide, and when you switch windows the layout is also changed.
nevertheless, have a look at ergonomic/optimized layouts (like neo ;)
There is an option in both Windows and Linux to use a US layout with additional international characters. For instance, typing an ä will be yielded by pressing RAlt+q. The good thing about this is that it's the same combination for Windows and Linux.
I think you can configure it easily with built-in Windows settings.
In "Control Panel" - "Clock, language and Region" - "Language", you can enable "Enable different input methods for each application window" (the translation is approximated because I am using Spanish OS). I think that suffices.
I created my own customized keyboard layout with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC)
I used my current keyboard as base and modified only a few keys in order not to always twist my right thumb when I want to get curling bracktes {}
It works very well in combination with a short-cut for switching the keyboard layout. You can define such shortcut in your system language settings.
I created shortcuts for some of my exe's in the program menu. For example, I might create shortcuts for a.exe, v.exe, and g.exe. By default, it aligns as a, g, v (in alphabetical order). I want to place my shortcuts in a different order, such as (v, a, g).
In short, I want to be able to change the order for the shortcuts it creates to something other than alphabetical order.
I am using wshshellobject in vb. I created a dll; through that I created my shortcuts
Assuming you're trying to modify the order of your shortcuts on the Start Menu, I'm not sure this is possible to do programatically (which is a shame - I've fired up the uninstallers for many apps in Vista/7 by typing their names and just hitting without looking!).
Microsoft's Raymond Chen posted this on his blog some time ago:
The classic Start menu and the "All
Programs" portion of the Windows XP
Start menu permit you to customize the
order of the shortcuts that appear
there. You can use drag/drop to
rearrange them, or force them to be
sorted by name. But why is there no
programmatic interface to these
actions?
Because the power would be used for
evil far more than it would be used
for good.
More info here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/06/19/636823.aspx