[sword-devel] keyboard navigation in Windows Sword

Chris Little sword-devel@crosswire.org
Wed, 26 Mar 2003 10:22:22 -0700 (MST)


On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Larry&Dana Stucky wrote:

> 1) Personally I dislike using the mouse any more than necessary.
> Consequently I'd appreciate being able to have keyboard shortcuts for
> the Back icon (how about Alt-Left, like a standard web browser?)

In addition to Backspace.  Plus maybe Alt-Right for Forward.

> Book name (Alt-B?), chapter# (Alt-C?), verse# (Alt-V?) & overall
> reference boxes (Alt-R?).

It sounds like you mean keyboard shortcuts to jump to these boxes, right?  
I wouldn't agree that this is necessary (if that is what you meant).  But 
I think it would be nice to have shortcuts like you list for 
incrementing/decrementing the book/chapter/verse by one.  Perhaps 
Alt-[BCV] for forward and Alt-Shift-[BCV] for backwards?

> Additionally it would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut to move
> backwards/forwards by one verse (Left/Right or Up/Down?), so that the
> commentaries will automatically display the next verse's info, etc.

I definitely agree with this, and curse all Bible software that doesn't 
implement this.

 
> 2) I'm not sure what you call the lower right box in the interface, but
> it is lacking a scroll bar. Since strongs often has words with the same
> root in sequential order, it would be helpful to facilitate the
> scrolling of that list.

It would be inefficient to load the entire list of entries into that box, 
so we only show as many as it can hold.  You can still move sequentially 
through the entries using up/down.
 
> 3) The layout of the icons under the menu could be better. If you don't
> have any more icons planned, you could reduce the vertical height to
> half, thus preserving the more important area for the Bible text itself.

I think the appearance depends on which version of Windows you are using.  
It looks horrible in XP and takes up twice as much space as it needs to.  
David Trotz had a file to fix this, but I don't think we distribute it.

The icons do simply need to be redone without text.  Graphic text is 
always a bad idea.  This is especially apparent when you try to localize 
the interface.  I would recommend we drop the current 32x32 icons and use 
some standard arrow/eyeglass 16x16 icons instead.

--Chris