Friend and colleague and fellow keyboard expert who has written a tool for keyboard construction that I feel is much more impressive than mine Marc Durdin recently blogged a blog on his Blog entitled Robust key message handling in Windows.

The permalink for the blog was one I found particularly amusing:

http://keyman.typepad.com/keyman_weblog/2008/06/robust-key-mess.html

:-)

This blog really covers many of the often complicated and often confusing issues I have covered over the years here, quite concisely.

I will briefly excerpt the one section most near and dear to my heart:

Shortcuts and Characters and Accelerators ... oh my

Unfortunately, there is no clear guidance on precedence between these three types of input.  Word does the following, which is fairly typical:

  • Shortcuts take precedence over characters - Ctrl+Alt+O switches to outline view
  • Characters take precedence over access keys - AltGr+O generates the ó character
  • Left Alt+O will open the Format menu.

That sounds almost like the best possible compromise.  But is it?  What if your computer does not have a right Alt key?  Should Ctrl+Alt+O insert ó or should it switch to Outline view?  I believe that Word's current precedence is wrong:

  • There is an alternative method for accessing Outline view through the menu system;
  • It is easy to redefine a particular shortcut if you really want to use it;
  • It is not easy to redefine your keyboard layout, and accessing the ó character through Insert|Symbol is painful.

Unfortunately, Windows does not make changing this precedence easy for application authors -- in fact, it is basically impossible to do it robustly.  So, to make the best of a bad situation, let's stick with what Word does - at least it is familiar to end users!

Yes, this is that issues I have gone on about in Get off my freaking key! and many others, though he definitely went the extra mile to describe an aspect to it that I have never done in a blog before....

Anyway, Robust key message handling in Windows is a really cool blog, so cool that I almost wish I had written it. :-)

But I am perfectly happy to point to the one who did.

I'll probably even be digging in to some of the aspects  of it that I find particularly interesting in the future....

 

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