Keyboard shortcuts for cursor movement in Neo 3?

[sardisson]

One of the things that I noticed when looking at OOo3 for the Feature Comparison page (and which is the main complaint listed in this review) is that they have somehow fixed the by word/by line keyboard navigation shortcuts.

I.e.,
Cmd-LeftArrow moves to the beginning of the line
Cmd-RightArrow moves to the end of the line
Cmd-Shift-LeftArrow selects to the beginning of the line
Cmd-Shift-RightArrow selects to the end of the line
Opt-LeftArrow moves to the beginning of the previous word
Opt-RightArrow moves to the end of the next word
Opt-Shift-LeftArrow selects to the beginning of the previous word
Opt-Shift-RightArrow selects to the end of the next word

These are all wrong in the standard OOo code, and while once upon a time we could fix them manually on a per-user basis, the complex procedure to do so really only works on a small segment of NeoOffice installs any more.

I've been wondering if it might be possible to a) find where in OOo3 Sun's engineers fixed this on the Mac and, if so, b) incorporate that code into NeoOffice 3?

(They haven't fixed everything, of course; I also noticed some of the shortcuts that you've fixed in NeoOffice code over the years are still broken in OOo3. IIRC, they're still using Cmd-Space instead Opt-Space for a non-breaking space, so they're breaking either Spotlight menu or switching keyboard layouts, depending on what Cmd-Space is configured for on the user's Mac.)

Smokey

[pluby]

[sardisson]

I assumed that the fix exists only in their custom Mac code (since the shortcuts that are right for the Mac are wrong for their Windows/Linux audience) and that since you're ripping out their custom Mac code, that fix would be lost along with all their bugs. I don't have a Neo3 pre-EA build, so I couldn't check for myself.

I really don't have a very good grasp of the OOo codebase, so maybe this was fixed in their Mac VCL (which I assume is what you're replacing), but I suppose maybe it was fixed in some sort of "shortcuts module" in an #IF_MAC block (which I assume wouldn't be replaced in a Neo build)? That's why my first part was "a) find where in OOo3 Sun's engineers fixed this on the Mac"

Smokey

[pluby]

And what does the OOo 3.0 help documentation say? I know that the OOo volunteers love to move stuff around without realizing that now the help documentation contradicts the actual behavior.

In any case, I will be really blunt. I have very serious concerns about the quality and speed of the OOo 3.0 codebase. Our list of issues is growing very fast (I have spent the last two days debugging why their extension manager code frequently crashes) so our main concern for the NeoOffice 3.0 release is getting the code to be reasonably stable, not tweaking features.

Despite the hype that OOo 3.0 was "three years in the making", we have seen many needless changes that don't improve or add features that the user can see and introduce breakage or instability (the "three product layer" concept is our favorite example of this). Also, there are some very noticable slowdowns in the application layer that we will need to chase down.

All this is not meant to scare anyone, but people should prepare themselves for the fact that in order to gain the new features in OpenOffice.org 3.0, we will experience a lot of the pain like we did in past Early Access Programs. This upgrade will not be a simple "tack on our code to OpenOffice.org's code" and we will have the same stability and speed as NeoOffice 2.2.5. Instead, it is more like yanking a custom engine out of one car and splicing it into a newer model.

Patrick

[OPENSTEP]

[sardisson]

[ovvldc]

[yoxi]

But does it wish for world peace?

- padmavyuha

[human]

[yoxi]

You'd never win a beauty pageant by being vegetarian

[ovvldc]

Not sure. I know some very pretty vegetarians .

Best wishes,
Oscar