Shortcuts question

Christoph Päper via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Fri Sep 7 08:03:46 CDT 2018


Shriramana Sharma:
> 
> 1) Are shortcuts like Ctrl+C changed as per locale? I mean Ctrl+T for
> "tout" io Ctrl+A for "all"?

Some are, many are not. For instance, some text editors use a modifier key with F and K instead of B and I for bold ("fett") and italic ("kursiv").

> 2) How about when the shortcuts are the Alt+ combinations referring to
> underlined letters in actual user visible strings?

Those depend much more language dependent than Ctrl/Cmd shortcuts.

> 3) In a QWERTZ layout for Undo should one still press the (dislocated wrt
> the other XCV shortcuts) Z key or the Y key which is in the physical
> position of the QWERTY Z key (and close to the other XCV shortcuts)?

For some shortcuts the key position is more important (e.g. the one left from the 1 key), for others it's the initial / conventional letter of the command. Most QWERTZ users are not used to expect the undo shortcut (Z) next to the keys for cut (X), copy (C) and paste (V). By the way, accompanying redo is notoriously inconsistent, sometimes Y, sometimes Shift+Z.

More serious problems arise with non-letter keys. For instance, square brackets [ and ] are readily available on the US / English keyboard layout, but require modifier keys like Shift or Alt on many other keyboard layouts, which may be the same ones as for the curly braces { and }. This means, some seemingly simple and intuitive shortcuts on an English keyboard become cumbersome on international ones.


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