several defects and enhacement-wishes

[samo at altern.org]

howdy.
i'm using xfce4.4rc1, that is 4.3.99 from ubuntu/edgy, with most of 
the stuff at http://xfce.corsac.net/.

here are some observations (those with '+' are wishes for enhancement; 
those with '-' are probably defects):

 + terminal: no way to move by keyboard between the "tabs" (general,
   appearance, colors,...). btw why not make them normal tabs - or let
   them behave as such. Ctrl-tab is a good default.

 + window-manager: need keyboard shortcut for opening the window-menu,
   (one which is opened by mouse-right-click on window-heading, or by
   the icon-buton there.)
   alt-space is a good default comnbination.
   this will free (for me) all the move/resize/whatever-window-related
   shorcuts

 + shortcut for switching tab's in the dialogs - ctrl-tab. 
   don't know if this has to go into gtkrc or where.. 
   now one has to focus on the tab's title, then use arrows..

 - window-manager: keyboard shortcuts cannot be edited by keyboard
   alone - e.g. Enter or Space opens the sub-dialog but immediately
   closes it, auto-assigning the key (Enter or space)

 - settings manager/panel-settings: opening panel-settings does not
   self-focus, i.e. focus stays on settings-manager-window

?- settings manager: sometimes the items have label like 
   'button label | whatever' instead of just whatever. This effect has
   disappeared for some time now, so it might have been fixed.

 - sometimes switching between desktops loses last focused window -
   focus goes nowhere - even if there is only 1 window. Has to use
   alt-tab to get back some focus. Actualy it is not nowhere, as
   pressing alt-f4 offers me quit/reboot/... closing the session.
   i just found it - when focus is on the desktop of one virtual
   desktop, switching virt.desktops does not restore (or just loses)
   their focuses. This is very dangerous as whatever u press goes to
   the desktop (e.g. delete will delete some shortcut)

 - switching between virt.desktops does flicker - because always
   redrawing the background picture First. 
   btw i've noticed similar thing when switching between 2 menus, so
   it might be deeper problem

 - no keyboard-shortcut for quit / popup logout/shutdown/.. menu. 
   now i am using desktop-menu (which is mappable, e.g.
   ctrl-esc->show-panel) and quit from there 

-+ resizing windows with keyboard - resize mode is entered by any of
   the shortcuts, but after that only normal arrows work. or actualy
   the arrows/keys that are used for moving.
   this might be an idea - it works this way now anyway - just 2
   keys to enter move/resize, then usual arrows after that, instead of
   than having 8 shortcuts lost.

 - desktop: initialy i was able to create/edit/assign several .desktop
   "shortcuts", and it was showing the comment while hovering
   the mouse over the icon. Now no more comment, it shows "kind,
   modified, size " triplet as with anything else, and
   right-click + edit-launcher does nothing. Properties allow some
   changes, but not the name of the thing...

-+ desktop: there is no way to focus there using keyboard. It _can_ be
   shown (that is, hide all else), but it is not focused. 

-+ desktop: Also, showing the desktop applies to all virt.desktops...
   i think anything with the xfdesktop applies to all virt.desktops
   (focusing too!), and this is not right... Or is this something to
   do with Thunar?

 - xfmixer/alsa: recording-level sliders are always reset immediately
   after any adjustment. so i have to use the text-mode alsa-mixer.

 - session-manager: never got it to save a session right. i want to
   just 3 simple items - Terminal, kmail and opera (or mozilla), each
   one on separate virt.desktop. i got all sorts of contents of the
   session cache-file - the terminal being Legacy-app, terminal
   missing, opera not available, kmail available and started
   but without a window, kmail missing, etc, etc. After long tweaking
   of them session-cache files i got it half working - but this is
   not acceptable. i guess i have chosen some incompatible trio, so
   what...

-+ Terminal: i cannot get ctrl-tab and ctrl-home/ctrl-end reach the
   shell inside, in some way distinguishable from usual tab/home/end.
   Any X-resource or similar thing i am missing? libvte doesnt seems
   to care... (yes my shell understands/uses all the keyboard via
   lots of mappings - imagine 4dos' full control over keyboard - we
   are not in 1970's). btw it is ok in xterm.

 + taskbar/panel - no way to show it / walk in there using keyboard. 
   my panel is autohidden, and i show it up when i need showing the
   app-menu - which works, but IMO this is a side efect and it may
   disappear one day. while Walking there is just not possible. 

another thing which may or may not be interesting to you - 
automounting removeable drives does not work here. drives are 
auto-shown (in thunar etc), yes, but never automounted. Regardless of 
the gnome-volume-manager settings. 

As a general comment - _anything_ doable by mouse should be doable by 
keyboard (or other comparable input device). Especialy when it is 
about dialogs/menu/etc tree-classification-based UI stuff. All this 
about UI usability is already invented, so many times, so far ago, 
why not use/apply it...


i'm posting this for discussion/FYI, once the things are 
confirmed/rejected, i can put them in the bugzilla if u want so.

----
user-profile:
i'm mostly heavy keyboard user. another hint is, i'm a sort of 
minimalistic tweaker, i don't like anything superflous (be it process 
or package or whatever). That's why i'm on xfce... 
so far it is the best tradeoff between Usability and 
Minimalism/simplicity. Although i will prefer usability than 
minimalism - still, kde/gnome do not give me the usability i would 
want/expect for such monstrous resources. windoze does but it is 
too "expensive" in all other ways...
although one cannot run away from gnome/kde/windoze completely, one 
can stay quite far away...


ciao
samo

some good reads:
usability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen
sw-organisation: 
http://www.easycomp.org/cgi-bin/OrgPatterns?BookOutline