several defects and enhacement-wishes

[Yves-Alexis Perez]

On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 10:32 +0300, samo at altern.org wrote:
> howdy.
> i'm using xfce4.4rc1, that is 4.3.99 from ubuntu/edgy, with most of 
> the stuff at http://xfce.corsac.net/.

This repository is deprecated (and may be taken down at any moment).
There is a replacement but outdated, as 4.3.99.1 is in unstable. There
is no support (from Debian Xfce team) on those packages, and they may be
broken at any time. 
Just a warning :)

> 
> 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.

Here I can do that with Control Home/End (which are default shortcuts
iirc). You can edit those shortcut using Preferences/Shortcut

> 
>  + 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

You can use xfce4-popup-menu if you have a panel plugin menu.

> 
>  - 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)

Here it works. Using keyboard I select "add", then i type the command,
then return, then i only have to type the shortcut to assign it. What is
the problem ?

> 
> ?- 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.

Never seen that.
> 
>  - 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)

I guess that's depends if you have the "focus follow mouse" activated or
not ?


>  - 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 

Just add a shortcut to xfce4-session-logout.
> 
> -+ 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,

i can confirm. Don't know if it's really a bug, though.
>  and
>    right-click + edit-launcher does nothing. 

Here it works. Use correct packages, maybe ?

> Properties allow some
>    changes, but not the name of the thing...

here it works too

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

yep


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

Is the correct device selected ?
> 
>  - 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...

I don't know about kmail and opera, maybe there are just not
session-capable. Here Terminal (xfce4-terminal package) is restored on
the correct desktop at login. Tuning the session cache file won't help
if you save your session at logout, though.

> 
> -+ Terminal: i cannot get ctrl-tab and ctrl-home/ctrl-end reach the
>    shell inside, in some way distinguishable from usual tab/home/end.

Iirc, ctrl+home/end goes to prev/next tab.

>    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.

What Xresources are you trying to set ?


> 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. 

Report that to gnome-volume-manager devs ?
> 
> 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.

I really think you should use some correct packages first. Some of the
issues are real one, though, especially about using only the keyboard,
focus things etc. Don't know if this can be achieved for 4.4, though.

Regards,
-- 
Yves-Alexis