Any appetite for tiny tweaks to make initial usability better?

[Martin Gladdish]

New Qubes user here, with less than a week's experience.

Having fumbled my way through the initial install I'm now encountering a few tiny niggles that should be simple to fix.

The first one that springs to mind is the default keyboard shortcuts in Terminal for Copy and Paste, which are Ctrl-Shift-C and Ctrl-Shift-V. But these clash with the inter-qube copy and paste shortcuts.

Changing the default modifier in the Terminal app to use Alt instead of Ctrl would seem to make sense? So Alt-Shift-C and Alt-Shift-V.

Smoothing these wrinkles, although each of them is tiny, could make a big difference IMHO.

Thoughts?

[qtpie]

Martin Gladdish:

Hi Martin,

In terminal you can use Ctrl+Insert as an alternative to Ctrl+Shift+C,
and Shift+Insert as an alternative to Ctrl+Shift+V. Maybe make a list of
all you annoyances and their solutions, and submit it to Qubes for
inclusion in the manual?

[Martin Gladdish]

Whilst I'm more than happy to contribute to the manual, I think this should be changed in the app settings too.

The labels on the menu items are where I'd look to see which shortcuts to use, and out of the box they say Ctrl-Shift-C, etc. I didn't know about those alternate shortcuts, and don't think I would have gone looking on the manual for them (but dead useful, thanks!).

But yes, happy to put a niggle list together and see what we can do about them. What's a good place for sharing such a doc online? I'd normally use GDocs, but after google shafted my production service the other week by mistakenly flagging it on its spam databases I'm loathe to touch anything of theirs again.

[Kushal Das]

I personally use Super+C and Super+V

Kushal
--
Public Interest Technologist, Freedom of the Press Foundation
CPython Core Developer
Director, Python Software Foundation
https://kushaldas.in

[unman]

Hi Martin

Thanks for the input - keep the niggles coming. I'd suggest just posting
in this thread for the moment.

The Ctrl+Shift+C combination in gnome-terminal is a gnome shortcut,
which can be configured as normal in gnome. There's an alternative
(Ctrl+Insert) as qtpie pointed out.
The use of Ctrl+Shift+C in Qubes is Qubes specific, and can be configured
by editing /etc/qubes/guid.conf

This question has been raised before, and there are open issues at
github.com/qubesos/qubes-issues/issues
The greatest problem with proposed replacements is that they will almost
always conflict with shortcuts used by other users in specific programs.
There's been some discussion about this before and it doesn't seem
possible to find combinations that wont conflict *somewhere*.
For example your proposed use of Alt+Shift+C is used in i3 to reload
configuration.

So it's left to users to configure as suits them. (In general Qubes
policy is not to change stuff that ships with distro defaults.)

unman

[mgla...@uxforms.com]

Thanks.

I agree completely that keeping as close to stock config as possible is the way to go, and I also think there are few things as tedious as favourite shortcut wars.

I think where I'm coming at this differently though is in the default experience of installing and using Qubes. I accepted all the defaults when installing, which uses the regular window manager and provides a set of applications installed and configured in the menus for each qube by default. I think it would be better, and smoother, if we could make the default installation not have conflicts with itself.

So, sure, if you want to use a different window manager than the default, then go ahead, and any keyboard shortcut conflicts are a possible byproduct of that. But the default shortcuts on the default apps, in the default window manager, should all play nicely together.