GSoC'22 - Week #8: Global Shortcuts

Posted 1 year ago

Palette Shortcuts

In the eighth week, significant progress was made on palette shortcuts. However, after consulting with the team, it was determined that this feature must remain a proof-of-concept for the time being. The justification for this is that there are a number of issues that directly impact this.

  • For instance, activities using default keyboard shortcuts cannot be cleared.
  • If new palette components are introduced in an update, the user cannot simply add them without resetting his palette settings, which also resets the palette shortcuts.
  • Now, this feature is accomplished by dynamically creating action names for each cell; hence, they cannot be exported since action names for each cell would vary across sessions. Therefore, this poses a problem for exporting/importing shortcuts.
  • A remedy to the aforementioned difficulty is to simply conceal the palette shortcuts in the preferences; however, this prevents the user from easily assigning or clearing a palette shortcut, which may not be desired.
  • The assigning of contexts to each palette item is a second significant challenge. There are around 1,000 palette elements, making it very difficult to attach a context to each cell.
  • The addition of palette shortcuts approximately tripled the number of actions. This significantly slows down the process of assigning or clearing a shortcut.

Shortcut Categorization

I will construct a draft pull request for this and work on the shortcut categories the following week. I now have draft categories for most of the actions, allowing me to soon submit a draft pull request for this as well.