Settings Keybindings page - Usability issues

[LorinRicker]

Atom 0.123.0, Ubunty/Linux 14.04 (Unity) -- enhancement, usability issue

The Settings-Keybindings page, which promises great things to a new Atom learner, deserves considerable attention and rewrite for usability:

1. The Command column, which is perhaps helpful to a plugin developer or someone who's ready to customize their own keystrokes (along with the info in the Source and Selector columns), is really not very helpful as to keystroke functionality. For example: "native!" means nearly nothing to the newbie, and "pane:show-item-4" is not very helpful either. Suggestion: Add another column with a functional and meaningful description of the keystroke's actual purpose/function.

2. Grouping/sorting the keystrokes quasi-alphabetical by name (from F11, a, alt-1 through ctrl-* and all the way down to up) is not conducive to finding, identifying and learning specific keystrokes. Suggestion: group the entire page by meaningful (and common) functions, not by keystroke name.

3. If the user has clicked on another tab/buffer in the editor (whether same pane or a split pane, doesn't matter) and then clicks back anywhere on the Keybindings page, the Search Bindings field grabs focus, thus returning the Keybinding page's view to the top-of-page, even if the user has scrolled down a considerable ways into the keybindings listing, and just wants to return to that spot to review something. Highly distracting and un-friendly. Suggestion: Do not let the Search Bindings field grab cursor and focus for click-on-page.

4. The Keybindings page looks to be in about 4-point type, and the page does not respond to window:increase-font-size. Now, at least some of Atom's enthusiastic adopters (like me) are officially Old Geeks, with eyesight of diminishing returns (blurry, ever lessening acuity), and we really need Larger Font sizes, plus increase/decrease size, everywhere in Atom (and especially here in the Keybindings listing). Suggestion: perhaps this page (and others?) could be generated on-the-fly from data, with format/rendition controls, rather than being a statically defined/formatted page.

These are just suggestions... I am willing to pitch in and help on these usability issues (and elsewhere).

[kevinsawicki]

Thanks for the writeup, these sound good to me :+1:

[Ben3eeE]

+1 for 3 it is very distracting and happens in more than the keybindings panel in Atom 1.10.2 also https://github.com/atom/settings-view/issues/549 sounds like a duplicate.

Some of the comments in https://github.com/atom/settings-view/issues/361 also describe this. #361 is similar but this happens when just changing focus with Ctrl+Tab or when going from one pane to another while #361 is when you go back from the clicking on a package showing the detail view with the readme and settings.

gifs: