How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

re: How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

h.v.dijk — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 09:48:49 GMT

["Alt+R" was shorthand for "invoking the keyboard accelerator in the appropriate manner to execute the item where the R is underlined, either pressing a plain R if invoked directly as a pop-up context menu, or Alt+R if invoked via the File menu." I guess I need to write even more formally now. -Raymond]

I didn't even think about the File menu. Actually, even in that menu, pressing Alt closes it. However, if you open the File menu with Alt+B (again, Dutch system), then shortcut keys work regardless of whether you release the Alt key. Both (hold Alt, press B, press H, release Alt) and (hold Alt, press B, release Alt, press H) work and do the same thing. That takes extra effort to get right, I never noticed it before, and I'm impressed. What also surprises me is that in the File menu, the Properties item is called Eigensc_h_appen, with H as its shortcut key, and appears directly below the Rename item. In the context menu, it is Eigens_c_happen, and there is a separator between the Rename and Properties items. Other menu items also differ in the chosen shortcut keys. I guess that's because the File menu also has an extra Close item at the very bottom taking up one fixed shortcut key, so it would look bad if the Properties item had a separator directly above and below it, and the shortcut keys for the other items get adjusted so that they don't conflict with Close.

re: How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

NP — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 02:35:17 GMT

There are system-wide shortcuts for which there must be a more formalized process for choosing them, as it is very easy to come up with shortcuts that would conflict with existing application shortcuts, which might not be easily localizable and which might not be easy to remember or use, especially for people with assistive technologies. I am shocked that a more formal procedure, at least for such system-wide shortcuts, is not followed.

Also, what about consistency. Surely many shortcuts are local to an application but there must be a consistent usage pattern across Windows.

In my experience I find that more recent versions of Windows, unlike Windows 95/98, contain many bugs having to do with keyboard usage. For example, Esc does not work when some of the fields in the Open/Save dialogs in Windows Vista/7 are highlighted. I have observed the bug with alt+enter mentioned above too. And Explorer and Windows Media Player beep when you select an item in the folder tree or the list of songs respectively. Plus many more bugs which are never fixed. I guess nobody uses the keyboard in Microsoft any more?

re: How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

DaveL — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 19:14:45 GMT

"Alt+R works if you don't already have the context menu open"

Are you sure? It certainly doesn't work as an accelerator to show the property pages for me.

re: How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

BradWestness — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:08:58 GMT

Alt+R works if you don't already have the context menu open. If the menu's already open, you just need to hit R (or whatever letter). If you just tap Alt (rather than holding it and striking a second key), the menu will take focus, underlining the shortcut letter for each menu item, and you can then hit the appropriate letter as a separate keystroke as well.

re: How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

DaveL — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:16:09 GMT

No, English systems work the same way as your Dutch one does. Pressing Alt will close the context menu. Just the letter key is the accelerator.

The real properties accelerator is Alt+Enter - but only in the listview pane for recent OS's implementations of Windows Explorer.

re: How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

Michael Geary — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:11:41 GMT

@h.v.dijk: No, it's not Alt+R and never could have been, at least as far back as I can remember. As you said, if you press the Alt key with the context menu open, it immediately closes the menu. The actual shortcut with the context menu open is simply the letter R.

The direct shortcut to open Properties in Explorer (without using the context menu) is Alt+Enter. This used to work everywhere in Explorer, but in Vista it got broken in Explorer's tree panel, and it's still broken in Windows 7 and 8.

re: How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

h.v.dijk — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 07:29:03 GMT

Is the shortcut for Properties on English systems really Alt+R? I use a Dutch system, so it's different for me, but on my Windows 7, when I press Alt, the context menu closes. I can open the Properties window with Shift+F10 (or the context menu key), then C-without-Alt (for Eigens_c_happen). Or do English systems have an Alt+R shortcut outside of context menus?

re: How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

Paul M. Parks — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:18:04 GMT

@jas88: The Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines should have what you're looking for.

msdn.microsoft.com/.../aa511258.aspx

re: How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

Joshua — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:57:52 GMT

@jas88: If he'd said that to me I'd have copied from Notepad as it seems to be the last Windows component to use a normal menu.

Which it should, given that it has to run from Server Core.

re: How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

jas88 — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:49:53 GMT

It would be nice if someone collated a web page/site listing shortcut keys, and menus for that matter; I recall some years ago having a boss whose stock answer to UI questions was "make it like Windows". The File menu was to be "like Windows" ... never mind that Explorer doesn't even HAVE a File menu, and he probably didn't mean to mimic Program Manager. (The end result had most of the File menu from Word XP, which we were using at the time, minus the bits that don't apply to a financial modelling product.)

Wikipedia has a promising-sounding page, 'table of keyboard shortcuts', but only covers operating system/shell shortcuts plus some web browsers. RIM and Apple both have support pages for their respective platforms, but a broad overview would be nice. (I might even give it a try myself sometime soon...)