[josm-dev] Please do not change long established shortcuts

Ian Dees ian.dees at gmail.com
Mon Apr 30 15:38:38 BST 2012


On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 9:13 AM, Maarten Deen <mdeen at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> My apologies for ranting, but please do not change shortcuts that were in
> use for I-know-not-how long. I just downloaded rev 5181 and found that the
> "d" key did not work. Someone decided that it should be the delete key.
> I can understand the reasoning. But do not decide for the whole community
> that it is better to have everyone change the way they work just because
> you think it is better. If you think deleting an item should be the delete
> key and it was programmed as "d", then your welcome to change it in your
> favourits.
> IMHO it is also a bad change because now I have to get my hand off the
> mouse to use the delete key where the d key is nicely positioned on the
> left side of the keyboard to use with my left hand.
>
> In principle, it is not a good idea to change long established customs.


"D" has been the shortcut for the "delete" action since I started using
JOSM several years ago. It changed a while back (thus I had to manually
change D back to "delete") but it sounds like maybe you saw it just change
back to being "delete" after being 'incorrect' for a while.

Regardless, I agree with you: developers should strive to keep keyboard
shortcuts stable to the best of their ability. As I've mentioned in a
previous thread, it's my opinion that JOSM should *especially* not change
manually specified keyboard shortcuts. If the user has bothered to
specifically set a shortcut, it should never be changed unless explicitly
by the user.


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