"Options"->"Open With" - still has issues

[grunt]

when trying to select some "special" letters for "Shortcut" something wrong happens. e.g., when trying to set "Shortcut" to "n" - new "Open With" entry is added, "d" - you get prompted whether you want to delete the current item, "a" - "Advanced" panel gets toggled, etc.

as an aside, it's not quite clear what you're supposed to type in in that "Advanced" editbox - it's pretty wide to imply something more substantial that a single letter and i don't think i recall help talking about this.

edit : win-xp sp2, bc3 v3.0.446

[Pete]

I can reproduce it: click in Shortcut field then type d.


The Shortcut field needs to be wide: try typing Ctrl-Shift-a and you'll see. Or are you talking about a different field. I see fields called "Description", "Shortcut", "Command Line", "Working Directory", and "Delimiter".

[grunt]

The Shortcut field needs to be wide: try typing Ctrl-Shift-a and you'll see. Or are you talking about a different field.

no, no, that's the one. while i agree that you need the width to be able to accommodate key combos, i find that particular "field" non-intuitive, for a number of reasons :

1. that "field" looks like a plain vanilla editbox, but behaves completely differently and you don't get much of an indication that once you land there your keystrokes will be interpreted differently.
2. that "field" is inconsistent - regular keys show up in it immediately after being pressed, but "special" keys (ctrl/alt/shift) - don't (as they do in other programs i know and use that allow configuring keyboard).
3. combined with 1 & 2, i find that field's width to be kind of confusing.

as an aside, for some reason some of the other fields in "Open With" page of options dialog are missing accelerators.

[Erik]

We'll have the shortcut edit fixed in the next release to prevent accelerator handling. It will be wider and we'll have a "Remove" button for "Open With" items. We'll try using a focused rectangle instead of a caret.

FYI, our shortcut edit behaves similarly to the editors I have tested, including Visual Studio.

[grunt]

FYI, our shortcut edit behaves similarly to the editors I have tested, including Visual Studio.

i don't have VS handy to do a comparison right now, but that doesn't even matter - afaic everything post vc6 (up to at least vs2005, haven't tried anything later) is not exactly a ui design role model... in fact, if bc3 ever became as "easy to use" as vs2003 i'd probably switch to some other diff tool.

as for other editors, i don't recall ever seeing keyboard rebinding mechanism that would provide as little feedback as this one (see the 3 points i mentioned)... ymmv, obviously.