Thanks, mouser. The reason I'm asking is because I'm trying to find the "least astonishing" behavior, and in this case it's not obvious to me. There is of course a story behind the question. I have a fairly complex command execution engine for KeyNote. It has a UI builder on one side, which lets you tear down the default menus and toolbars, all of them, and create your own from scratch. (Allowing only one menu to be customized makes little sense, because the mechanism required to run it is exactly the same as the mechanism that allows you unlimited customization.) Another part of the scheme is a macro engine, which records and replays commands and, yes, persists them as scripts that you can easily edit.

Basically, commands have required and optional parameters. The optional parameters fill in default values, while required params must be given explicitly. So for example, a File|Open command looks like this in a menu configuration file:
<menuitem command="fileOpen" />

When this is triggered, the engine finds that the required "filename" argument is missing, and finds a handler for the command that gets the filename (e.g. by putting up a dialog box). The command also has an optional "readOnly" parameter, which defaults to false. What this lets you do is add a menu item like this:
<menuitem command="fileOpen" fileName="c:\somefile.txt" readOnly="true"/>

In short, you can put a mini-macro right in the menu. This, I hope, would be useful for things like commonly used font styles, etc - instead of going through a dialog box every time, you can add a custom menuitem that defines all the style settings. When you do so, you can specify whatever parameters you need, and the engiine will either fill in missing optional params, or prompt you for the missing required ones.

But once you have this, you need to figure out how much information to store when recording a macro the "normal" way, for replaying. For each command I can either store just the command itself (which would require user action on replaying, if the command has any required parameters), or I can store some/all of the actual parameters used for the command.

I agree with you about seeing what it does and tweaking the scripts manually, but most people won't go as far. For them, I need to provide the most useful behavior out of the box.

On edit: And you will be able to have a three-way toggle :) <bold/> by itself would toggle, and then there's <bold on="true"/> and <bold on="false"/> to force it either way. I'm sinplifying the syntax here, but just to give the idea.

marek

But, I would have to say that the "right-click" key is the most unused key on my keyboard.

The other two that are right up there are right-ctrl and right-alt, in that order.

-kfitting (February 10, 2007, 08:51 AM)

All this goes to show is that no keys should ever be removed, ever :)

I love the right-click key, because it gives me the context menu without using the mouse. Shift+F10 should also do that, but many programs ignore it or override with other functionality.

Right ctrl is awfully useful for clipboard and navigation actions with home/end/insert/delete keys. And without right alt you couldn't type national characters in any non-Western language. Right Alt (sometimes called AltGr, for "alternate graphic") adds all the twiggly tails and accent marks to latin characters. I couldn't type in Polish at all without right alt.

On edit: Wikipedia has a whole article on AltGr, quite informative too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altgr

For me, the most useless (and also the most anoying) key in my keyboard is definitelly the 'insert' key. I always wondered why people invented that thing. I even removed it from my external keyboard, because i kept inadvertely pressing it, and overwriting stuff!

-jgpaiva (February 10, 2007, 07:31 AM)

Heh, I can't live without Insert. Word has always had a fantastic feature which makes Insert work as Ctrl+V, ie Paste. It's much, much faster that way for me. I find Ctrl+Insert for Copy fast than Ctrl+C too, perhaps because I'm better at using my right hand.

I carried that over to some of the programs I've written, using Insert to mean "add new [thing]", where "thing" is whatever the program is designed to handle, e.g. add a new address in an addressbook, add a new password in a password manager, etc.

The upshot is, I cannot work with any of the newer keyboards where the insert/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdn keys are not arranged in two rows, 3+3. Any other layout and I'm helpless :)