Keyboard shortcut themes

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hey,

I'm kind of back working on the alpha release and the keyboard
shortcuts of xfwm4 in particular. However, it occurs to me that the 
keyboard themes which we have in both xfwm4 and the command shortcuts 
make things overly complicated, especially if we want to avoid 
conflicts between xfwm4 and command shortcuts.

Before we can finish this several questions have to be answered:

 a) Do we want to share themes between xfwm4 and the command shortcuts?
 b) If a), how do we make this behaviour transparent to the user? Just
    imagine a user creates a new theme in xfwm4 and loses all his
    command shortcuts because the command shortcuts are now empty or
    copied from a default theme?
 c) If not a), how do we handle conflicting shortcuts? Imagine there's
    one xfwm4 theme and two command themes and the user creates a new
    xfwm4 shortcut - what if this shortcut already exists in one of
    the command themes?

The way I see it, there are four possible solutions: the good (2x), the
bad and the ugly:

  Good: Merge both shortcut dialogs (I already have some ideas on how
        that might look like). 
      
        Pros: Clearly transparent behaviour, it's easy to handle 
              conflicts inside one theme and conflicts are impossible at
              any given time (unless you edit the configuration files
              manually).

        Cons: All xfwm4 features available for shortcuts have to be 
              maintained inside xfce4-settings.

  Good: Get rid of the themes concept. Whether this is good or not
        depends on how frequently this feature is used though. I can
        imagine several situations where it might be useful but in most
        of them I'd personally rather create another user than to switch
        the keyboard theme.

        Pros: Transparent behaviour, conflicts can be avoided globally
              and are thus impossible, less maintainance overhead and
              not much work to be done before the alpha release.

        Cons: Reduced configurability/functionality.

  Bad:  Don't handle conflicts at all. Alternatively handle them by
        checking the currently active themes only. 

        Pros: Not too much work.

        Cons: Leaves conflict handling to the user (which is pretty
              nasty) and may lead to introduced conflicts when switching
              themes.

  Ugly: Implement share themes between both shortcut dialogs.

        Pros: Conflicts are not much of a problem.

        Cons: A lot of work, difficult to make the behaviour
              transparent for the user, difficult design decisions as
              explained in a), b) and c) to be made.


I'd be fine with either one of the "good" solutions. Are there any
other good ones you can think of? What are your opinions anyway?

  - Jannis