Filer shortcuts...

I just noticed that on the recent ROM, the “delete” keyboard shortcut on the filer changed from “DEL” key to control-x. I don’t know if its possible for the users to change it..
I tried to install the !Quickfiler, but it could not be installed (token MT12 mismatch).
Well, all the other OS’s I am using they use the “DEL” key as “delete” on their file managers…. so is there any way (like a patch) to do this on the recent ROM?
thank you in advance

If the shortcut is put back to being the delete key, can that be abbreviated to Del on the menu? it looks a bit silly at the moment saying “Delete Delete”!

The problem with the delete key doing deletes is that we have no waste basket (hint, hint) as standard in RISC OS so it’s very easy to accidentally delete an entire directory full of stuff irrecoverably. Not good. And yes, “Delete DELETE” did look stupid. Finally, QuickFiler also used ctrl-X for deleting files. Maybe you just need to get into the habit of this being the RISC OS way to do it – like middle mouse button for menus rather than right mouse button?

hm..I thought QuickFiler supported customized shortcuts..

Del shouldn’t delete without confirmation (ever, under any circumstances).

Ctrl-X however doesn’t mean “delete”, it means “cut”… and since there’s nowhere to put files that have been cut before being pasted elsewhere, I think Windows’ behaviour should be adopted.

^^ What he said.

As we have no “Undelete” and a filesystem that doesn’t lend itself to undeleting files, a delete should always ask unless the user explicitly says not to (a delete of a folder or >3 objects should turn confirm on so the user has a chance to notice before nuking a lot of stuff).

Never EVER use ^X to delete.

No, Steve, QuickFiler is wrong. The only time it is advisable to use ^X to “delete” is when you can go to a different folder and ^V to paste the ‘deleted’ files in there. Don’t say we need to get used to anything – you’ll risk a lot of data loss and p!ssing off many people if you take a world-known copy/cut/paste metaphor and recycle part of it to mean delete.

[To expand upon Nemo’s statement about Windows behaviour – ^X does not delete files; they are flagged as “hidden”. If you go somewhere else and paste, the files are moved. If you copy/cut something else, the files are unhidden. This is all quite visible if you have Explorer set to show you hidden files.]

Did nobody read the check-in log? This is also laying the groundwork for ctrl-v and ctrl-c shortcuts…

No, Steve, QuickFiler is wrong.

I think you forgot the “IMO” there. It’s not wrong, it’s plain common sense; don’t have a single key for potentially deleting an entire directory structure when we don’t also have an “undelete” function available. And maybe we should always confirm deletes, as nemo says, but I didn’t hear loads of people complaining about the way RISC OS does deletes for the past 22 years… and we’ve not even changed it!

but I didn’t hear loads of people complaining about the way RISC OS does deletes for the past 22 years… and we’ve not even changed it!

Because, of course, no one ever spent time making utilities like dustbin, garbage, wastebin, and (special mention) Blackhole 2.

Silly question but did anyone attempt to contact the original author and ask about source for incorporation? Or even permission for a sufficiently talented person to hack/reverse engineer?

If you really want dangerous in an OS, make the key combination people use elsewhere to operate a cut as part of a cut/paste simply delete with no comeback.

Clearly, you can’t win them all. There are always haters of any particular key combination, it seems. We’ve already had complaints about “delete” being too dangerous and now we’ve got people complaining about ctrl-X. How about we make it shift-alt-ctrl-escape with a warning error box and a PIN entry so everyone’s covered. ;)

[…] with a warning error box and a PIN entry so everyone’s covered.

But you have to pay for Windows Vista user account control don’t you?

Ctrl-X seems entirely reasonable, !Edit, !Draw, and !StrongEd all use that for delete.

I think you forgot the “IMO” there.

No IMO needed. The part I was saying is wrong is to take a keyboard shortcut that pretty much the entire rest of the world understands as “cut” (a reversible non-destructive action on its own) and replace it with “delete” (in our case, a currently non-reversible destructive action).

Heck, even flippin’ Macs use Command-X (I guess they don’t have/use Ctrl?) to mean Cut!

And yes, PIN entry for deleting files is good. Plus parental lock (so the kids and stop their parents being morons). :-P Plus modifications to the OS to examine the file being deleted and respond “You don’t want to do that, Dave”.

I agree that having Ctrl-X or DEL for an irreversible delete operation is going to catch out newcomers to RISC OS or returners who have spent the last twenty years using Windows or almost any other operating system.

As long as it is turned off by default, or the confirm deletes Filer option is applied by default, I would be happy, though.

You know what? I would prefer that we change RISC OS so that Control-X works as Cut (reversible) and Delete works as Delete (non-reversible). RISC OS is the one that is out of step with the rest of the world. I see such standardisation of the meaning of keys as being helpful, possibly leading to less mistakes.

“Change RISC OS” is of course a vague and general term to encompass components of the OS, and apps.

What does the Style Guide say? If it doesn’t already say Control-X is Cut (reversible) and Delete is Delete (non-reversible), I’d vote to change it to say so.

The most irritating thing about the Iyonix was that the DELETE key no longer worked consistently as a ‘backspace and delete left’ key throughout and sometimes behaved as the dreaded Windoze ‘delete to the right’ key. I had got used to the ‘Copy’ (now called ‘End’) key doing this. Fortunately most software does still do this. There is nothing more irritating to find that the ‘End’ key has taken the cursor miles away from where you want it (to delete the character to the right of the cursor) and you have to move back up to find where you want to be.

Can we make the action of the ‘DELETE’ and ‘COPY’ key configurable so that the operating system can behave as most of the applications do when editing text?

I like the delete key deleting to the right :)

On the subject of CTRL-X – I thought the ‘standard’ RISC OS shortcut for ‘delete’ was CTRL-K. Edit and Draw may do things differently but they’re old and not compliant with the style guide. In fact I just tested Draw and it recognises both CTRL-X and DEL.

IMHO it’d be nice if the DEL key continued to be a shortcut for delete but forced Filer Action to go into ‘confirm’ mode. CTRL-K could be a shortcut for ‘delete with currently configured confirm option’.

It’d also be nice if, when you pressed either shortcut key (and only in this circumstance), the Filer Action window was given the focus, and also responded to keyboard shortcuts.

YMMV 8)

The most irritating thing about the Iyonix was that the DELETE key no longer worked consistently as a ‘backspace and delete left’ key throughout and sometimes behaved as the dreaded Windoze ‘delete to the right’ key.

I thought that was the RISC OS 5 default action. Using an Iyonix for 10 years, the Delete key deleting right has become second nature to me. Virtually all apps I use behave in this way.

I find it very irritating with certain apps that force the old (BBC B?) action, eg HTMLEdit, when I find the Delete key deletes to the left rather than the right, which is done by End in that app.

The Iyo was the first to implement delete doing right-delete as opposed to Copy/End. Acorn always had it as Delete=left, Copy/End=right (ie. the two keys were left and right of each other). It made sense, albeit that it didn’t correspond to the keys. However, I’d have expected the OS5 feature to carry through to apps – I’m surprised HTMLEdit (which uses a fairly-heaily-modified !Edit engine) doesn’t pick that up.

Incidentally, other apps (Impression, I think, and Messenger to name two) use ^K for deletions (Kill) to avoid confusion with ^X (cut).

(Just read Rik’s post which said the same thing).

Steve who reminds me of Revels wrote:

maybe we should always confirm deletes, as nemo says, but I didn’t hear loads of people complaining about the way RISC OS does deletes for the past 22 years… and we’ve not even changed it!

At least opening the filer menu, moving the pointer to the object entry, sliding right, then down and then clicking on “Delete” is not likely to be done while looking at another window and thinking it had the focus.

Having said that, it is still possible to click on “Delete” instead of its neighbour, and I do recall a discussion with a Steve regarding filtering said menu operation to introduce a such confirmation step here too. :-)

Rik wrote:

In fact I just tested Draw and it recognises both CTRL-X and DEL.

Hang on, partial information is worse than none at all. Do you mean (as I suspect you do) that DEL deletes the selection whereas Ctrl-X cuts it to the clipboard, ready to be restored with Ctrl-V?

And anything (Filer included) pretending to be an editor and responding to Ctrl-X and Delete keys better also support F8 (undo).

Allowing (i) filer windows to have the input focus and (ii) DELETE to delete files or directories is being undertaken effectively in a single step without adequate user testing. It would be unfortunate if, whilst typing in an editor one was able to find a key combination where the first key closed the window and the second key deleted a directory full of word processor files.

Or a drag to save a file from a text editor ended up giving the input focus (from the save window text) to the filer window rather than the editor and then one resumes typing…

better also support F8 (undo).

<cough> ^Z would be nice, too. :-P

On a more serious note – should we continue with RISC OS specific keyboard shortcuts or look to making more adoption of those keys that are commonplace on other systems?

It could be managed by devising pseudo keys (ie a keypress for “cut” etc) and the Wimp could have a keyboard mapping. In this way, people can load “Acorn” keymap or “Linux” keymap or hack their own preferences.

I like the idea of having a plug-in in !Configure that lets you define key maps, with the ability to load/save alternate maps (e.g. olde-style RISC OS, Windows-esque, etc). This would avoid antagonising people by choosing one way over the other. Perhaps there should also be a ‘run at first boot’ program that allows people to set this sort of stuff up.

OS X has a keyboard shortcut editor in its System Preferences program for certain shortcuts (not cut/copy/paste), and also lets you define your own.

CTRL-X meaning ‘delete’ in the Filer without confirmation is bad. Imagine if you’re new to RISC OS, you want to move a file and you end up deleting it instead. I’m not sure I’d bother using it again if that happened to me.

CTRL-X meaning ‘delete’ in the Filer without confirmation is bad.

Any keys doing that would be bad. (Though ctrl-x would be the start of a move, if it wasn’t completed the file would stay put.)

I would like to see a system choice between old school RISC OS copy, move and paste and Select\Windows style. (Using clipboard).

I like the stronged method, where adding shift uses the clipboard.

As the maintainer of QuickFiler for many years, I am VERY glad that at long last the RO5 Filer itself is now gaining some shortcut keys of its own. Although I am a little sorry that the keys chosen are rather different to those normally used by QuickFiler by many users for many years. No doubt we will get used to them!

I am therefore proposing NO further development of QuickFiler, either for RO5.19 and later, or for RO6.whatever that also included some shortcuts. I am not planning to try and create a version of QuickFiler for older machines that mimics either RO5.19 or RO6 Filer shortcuts, unless there is overwhelming demand (and it proved possible!).