Project window tabs

I don't know how or why people remember all of the thousands of key combinations needed to
do things via the keyboard that are so much more easily done with a mouse, or better yet a
trackball.

Sure I memorized them when I had to use VI, WordStar, or WordPerfect, but I find that those
brain cells are put to much better use now.

It's a new millennium, embrace the GUI and that dreaded positional input device. They go
together naturally. :)

I also don't know how and why, I just know I do. And I know that, using mostly the keyboard, I don't keep moving my arm + hand from keyboard to mouse back and forth. If I had a third arm + hand, it would surely be at the mouse/trackball all the time.

I don't know how or why people remember all of the
thousands of key combinations needed to
do things via the keyboard that are so much more
easily done with a mouse, or better yet a
trackball.

Picture this hypotetical, fantastical situation: I'm typing code, and then I need to open the project view for some twisted reason. I have two options: press a key combination, keeping my hands right where I'll need them next, or move them away, reach the mouse, point it to the project tab, and click a button.

Things are so much easily done with a mouse. Suuuuuure.

Just like the other comments, I have to agree with them. I don't use my mouse that often. The more I can do with my keyboard the happier I am. As Marcus said, being busy typing code and that having to find the mouse on my desk is much slower than being able to use the keyboard to do stuff.

Nothing wrong with nice guis, as long as the shortcuts or keycombos are working :).

Pictured! I'm not saying it's not easy... I'm saying it's much more practical, much more convenient, for me to hold the Alt key with my thumb finger, press key 1 with my ring finger, then control navigation with left/right keys... If I can do the same with the new combo, no problem.

I have nothing against mouse or any other pointing device, I just think they're not usually very helpful when we TYPE code.

Hello Franklin,

Try Alt+F1

-

Maxim Shafirov
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"

Thanks Maxim, it helped.

I can see the following behavior in a selected combo in many applications I use:

Down/Up: changes selection without showing the drop down menu and without losing the focus!
AltDown or AltUp: shows/hides the drop down menu. It also doesn't lose the focus.

Anyway, couldn't you keep the AltLeft/AltRight behavior in project window?

Franklin.

P.S. There are few strings missing resources. I mean, I can see !title.scope!, etc.

Marcus Brito wrote:

Picture this hypotetical, fantastical situation: I'm typing code, and then I need to open the project view for some twisted reason. I have two options: press a key combination, keeping my hands right where I'll need them next, or move them away, reach the mouse, point it to the project tab, and click a button.

There's no need for sarcasm, I have been coding for quite a few years and using IDEA since
version 2 point something.

I realize that there are times when you want to switch between coding and project view.
Usually, I will want to navigate through the hierarchy next, which I also find easier to do
with the trackball and scroll wheel.

I guess that I just don't see writing code as a rapid typing situation. I usually do some
thinking and pause from typing now and again. I also don't find using a trackball any
slower than trying to look up or remember the key sequences, especially since there are so
many of them and they seem to change more often than people would like.

Don't get me wrong. There are some things that I do prefer to do with the keyboard, like
typing code, , , , , , ,
, ... But when the sequences get to be too many, too obscure, and too non-standard
I find that it is just not worth the effort to learn them.

I applaud JetBrains for sticking with the goal of making available as much as possible
without requiring the use of the mouse, and I am always amazed at how some people find it
easy to learn and remember them all. I am simply not one of them. I hope that support for
mouse-enabled functionality, like drag and drop refactoring in the project view, is not
sacrificed to enable that goal.

You're right that there are a lot of keyboard combinations. I just learn them slowly overtime. Eventually you get to a point where you know the vast majority of them without looking them up. Sure you can do everything with the mouse but it's just too clumsy for me to grab it every 10 seconds to do something that I can easily just hit a couple of keys for.

Of course, too much keyboard familiarity can be bad: I can't tell you how many times I've been typing a post like this one and hit Ctl-W to select some text and the browser window goes away! Damn that pisses me off but I stil do it on occasion. But I'll take that penalty for a smoother experience withing the IDE. :)

Hello Marc,

Now if we only could change that unlucky Ctrl+W default choice :)

-

Maxim Shafirov
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"

lol
JetBrains are brainwashing us, arn't they?
Often I find my self hitting Ctrl-Space in Word :))

Marc Stock schrieb:

Of course, too much keyboard familiarity can be bad: I can't tell you how many times I've been typing a post like this one and hit Ctl-W to select some text and the browser window goes away! Damn that pisses me off but I stil do it on occasion. But I'll take that penalty for a smoother experience withing the IDE. :)

"Tim Haley" <ymaraner@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:dtkc6o$7ht$1@is.intellij.net...

I don't know how or why people remember all of the

thousands of key combinations needed to

do things via the keyboard that are so much more easily

done with a mouse, or better yet a

trackball.

>

Sure I memorized them when I had to use VI, WordStar, or

WordPerfect, but I find that those

brain cells are put to much better use now.

>

It's a new millennium, embrace the GUI and that dreaded

positional input device. They go

together naturally. :)

Mouse sucks. Sensible shortcuts, tabgroups and tab order
rule. I should not have to use mouse unless I am freedrawing
in Paintbrush.

I'm a child of the GUI era, and was a mouse user long before I was a keyboard
shortcut user. I fought learning the keyboard shortcuts hard: I liked my
mouse, I was good at it, fast, efficient...

I finally gave in to the keyboard: I installed Cygwin, I memorized IDEA's
shortcuts, I learned what meager Windows shortcuts exist...and I'm a whole
lot more productive. From my experience, you need a great mouse-based interface
to support feature discovery, and you need a great keyboard-based interface
to keep the power users.

Hello Michael,

"Tim Haley" <ymaraner@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:dtkc6o$7ht$1@is.intellij.net...

>> I don't know how or why people remember all of the
>>

thousands of key combinations needed to

>> do things via the keyboard that are so much more easily
>>

done with a mouse, or better yet a

>> trackball.
>>
>> Sure I memorized them when I had to use VI, WordStar, or
>>

WordPerfect, but I find that those

>> brain cells are put to much better use now.
>>
>> It's a new millennium, embrace the GUI and that dreaded
>>

positional input device. They go

>> together naturally. :)
>>

Mouse sucks. Sensible shortcuts, tabgroups and tab order rule. I
should not have to use mouse unless I am freedrawing in Paintbrush.

WordStar use Ctrl-C to scroll down, and when reading from floppy,
control is transferred to DOS, which interpretes ctrl-c as "break
prosess", so continuous scroll down of long files occassionaly abandones
WordStar. Sinse that I have hard time to accept ctrl-c as clipboard copy
command instead of ctrl-ins :-o

By the way, is it possible to measure acceleratorkey vs mouse triggering
statistics per ProductivityFeature and suggest acceleratorkey hint, if
some usage pattern tresshold is exceded?

- Olli -

Sven Steiniger kirjoitti:

lol
JetBrains are brainwashing us, arn't they?
Often I find my self hitting Ctrl-Space in Word :))

Marc Stock schrieb:

>> Of course, too much keyboard familiarity can be bad: I can't tell you
>> how many times I've been typing a post like this one and hit Ctl-W to
>> select some text and the browser window goes away! Damn that pisses
>> me off but I stil do it on occasion. But I'll take that penalty for a
>> smoother experience withing the IDE. :)