Adjustable shortcut keybinds

[MatthewMarinets]

My use case

I make frequent use of alt-codes when typing, especially for characters like "«»". Right now, you can't use any alt-code that includes the digits 1-4, because that's the shortcut for changing views. Qt already supports alt-codes, as I can type any code that doesn't include 1-4, but I will never be able to do e.g. ♥ (alt+3), which is a little heartless.

Possible solutions

The simplest solution is to just change the current view-changing hotkeys to something else; I'm going to experiment with changing it to ctrl+alt+1-4 locally after writing this up, but I'd consider this a temporary solution and likely disruptive to other users who don't need my use-case and prefer the old hotkeys.

Personally, I would angle for adjustable hotkeys. If you want extreme polish, you could make a whole UI window that lists all the bindable actions and lets us adjust the hotkey in the menu. On the opposite end, I'd consider it entirely reasonable to just make a hotkeys.txt file that can be used to change the hotkeys on startup. A quick search on the codebase shows .setShortcut() is called 89 times.

I'm not familiar enough with Qt and GUI design to judge how hard making a new window would be, so I'll quickly analyze the hotkeys file approach and let you decide if it sounds sensible.

Simple Example (hotkeys file approach)

    # View > TreeView
    self.aFocusTree = QAction("Focus Project Tree", self)
    self.aFocusTree.setStatusTip("Move focus to project tree")
    self.aFocusTree.setShortcut("Alt+1")
    self.aFocusTree.triggered.connect(lambda: self.theParent.switchFocus(nwWidget.TREE))
    self.viewMenu.addAction(self.aFocusTree)

Would get an entry in hotkeys.txt like:

"Focus Project Tree": "Alt+1";

After reading the file into a dict named hotkeys, the code becomes:

    # View > TreeView
    action_name = "Focus Project Tree"
    shortcut = hotkeys.get(action_name, "Alt+1")
    # set the shortcut to default if it's invalid
    self.aFocusTree = QAction(action_name, self)
    self.aFocusTree.setStatusTip("Move focus to project tree")
    self.aFocusTree.setShortcut(shortcut)
    self.aFocusTree.triggered.connect(lambda: self.theParent.switchFocus(nwWidget.TREE))
    self.viewMenu.addAction(self.aFocusTree)

Disadvantages (hotkeys file approach)

While on the surface rebindable keys are simple, there's a few edge cases that can result in some feature creep.

• Need to validate the shortcut string somehow; I haven't used Qt much, so I'm not sure if there's a builtin for that
• Need to decide how to deal with overlap, when one key-sequence is mapped to multiple actions
• Need a robust hotkeys format; I used a line of JSON in my example, but that runs the risk of breaking if a less technical user forgets a quote or something.
  • Maybe just go plaintext, one shortcut per line, use a single separator like ':' or '|' to separate name from shortcut, and ignore spaces? Should be easy to read / assemble a dict in Python.
• Possibly need a way of telling users what key corresponds to what action.
  • Worst comes to worst, users like me can just look stuff up in the code (thanks, Python).
• Worst case for development, you'd need a hotkey-manager component for reading the file, dealing with edge cases, sending warnings about malformed shortcut strings, and generating a template file for users to modify.
• Need to add all this to documentation somehow

[vkbo]

Yeah, novelWriter is written with Linux in mind, so the quirky Alt+number approach on Windows hasn't really crossed my mind. I don't really want to write a customiseable shortcut tool until I really have to. I'd rather just change those shortcuts or redirect or disable them on windows.

[MatthewMarinets]

I'm not sure even that many Windows users use alt-codes, which is why I leaned my proposal so far toward customizability rather than just changing things. I still think it's really simple to have a textfile that can customize hotkeys if you just make it clear that edge cases like multiple hotkeys linked to the same shortcut aren't dealt with specially, I know big-name games and enterprise software that doesn't deal with that case.

[MatthewMarinets]

There's only six hotkeys that use alt+something: focus tree, editor, right pane, outline; and right-pane history back and forward. I changed them all locally to use ctrl+alt and things work for me now. Again, pushing this to everyone may be disruptive for those used to the old keys. At the very least, I can confirm that this simple fix works as expected, and it only requires changing 6 lines (could be done with four, ctrl+left/right don't have to be remapped).

Also pulled latest code before making this change, and just wanted to say thanks for making big files load so much faster. I was shocked by how big the improvement was ♥.

[vkbo]

If I'm making customised keybindings, I will probably make a GUI settings tool for it. Which isn't a big job, but still takes a bit of effort. I'll keep it in mind.

I've tried to stick to established standard shortcuts where possible, and in some cases they are different depending on OS. Changing the focus shortcuts to Ctrl+Alt on Windows isn't a big deal but it may be a bit disruptive as you say. I'll think about it.

Also pulled latest code before making this change, and just wanted to say thanks for making big files load so much faster. I was shocked by how big the improvement was .

The bottle neck is the spell checker, and your Preferences is probably set to the internal one, which is slow and not very good. The Spell Enchant spell checker is much faster. I did make a speed improvement to the internal one a while back though.

You can also specify a limit for how large documents in kB the editor will automatically spell check. When automatic spell check is off, it checks spelling as you type instead.

[vkbo]

From version 1.4 (just made a beta release of 1.4) the focus shortcuts will use Ctrl+Alt+1 etc on Windows.

As for the editable shortcuts, I will keep this issue open for later. I do intend to implement it at some point.