How to format the items in the File menu..
You'd think mnemonics and accelerators for the typical File menu operations of New/Open/Save/Save As would be standardized, if not across platforms, then within heavy-use applications on the same platform. Well, they're not!
I've found that New, Open and Save are fairly standard, using Ctrl+N, Ctrl+O and Ctrl+S accelerators respectively.
Save As, however, presented a minor conundrum. One of the most popular applications around - Firefox - doesn't even have a "Save As" option, and instead uses "Save Page As". Intriguing, however, is that the key mnemonic used is 'A', which is the mnemonic used for "Save As" is many other applications, but the accelerator is Ctrl+S, which is the accelerator used for "Save" in most applications.
In Eclipse, "Save As" doesn't even get an accelerator by default (yuck!).
After digging at bit further, I found that many applications intended for use on Linux use "A" as the mnemonic and "Ctrl+Shift+S" as the accelerator. I like this quite a bit, and thus have incorporated it into the Plotter.
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Adding a shift to the Save accelerator does indeed seem to have settled in as the convention for Save As. Mac OS X does the same thing: Command-Shift-S is the Save As convention on that platform (Command being the equivalent of Ctrl on that side).
ReplyDeleteConspicuous exception: Safari has a Save As command, but not Save. In that application, Save As has the Save accelerator of Command-S.
Discuss :)