Navigation ←↑↓→ F1-F4

[bunnie]

Navigation in the Chat UI includes:

• the up/down ↑↓ keys to scroll up/down thru the Posts.
• the right → key will show options specific to the hilited Post - reply, edit, delete etc.
• the left ← key will show the Chat App menu - login, logout, change conversation etc.
• the F1-F4 key are currently unassigned

There are some open questions:

• what is the best use of the F1-F4 keys?
• would page-up / page-down be useful? and how?
• would search on author / date be helpful?
• the Name of the Dialogue probably should be displayed somwhere
• other?

checkout the chat readme

Discussion and ideas most welcome

[bunnie]

These are my opinions, take them with a grain of salt:

• I think F1-F4 keys should be used for text prediction suggestions
• Page-up/page-down jumps out to me as being implemented as shift-up-arrow and shift-down-arrow
• I think the name of the dialog should be displayed on the top, and can be added within the redraw routine for the chat library. This gives us a hook to put other status-like UI elements as well

After thinking it about it a bit, using left and right arrow as context menus are the only real options we have if F1-F4 are used for predictive text.

While I found it counter-intuitive, I think it's not a problem if the enrollment process showed the help screen (the problem on my system is it didn't). I'll open an issue around that.

[dumblob]

Yep, F1-F4 could indeed be a good choice for prediction. Two remarks:

1. we can predict not just text (but perhaps based on user settings or some context switch, it might be smileys, numbers & contacts from PDDB, calendar items, etc.)

2. F1-F4 can be used in a chorded manner to get some more combinations - so the predictions shown could be e.g. in 3 lines and the bottommost line would correspond 1:1 to F1-F4, the middle line of predictions would be pair chords of the neighbouring Fs (i.e. only 3 predictions) and the topmost line would be for some more complex chords