Ctrl-L is a poor keybinding for "Clear"

Bug #304477 reported by Ben Gamari
84
This bug affects 16 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Empathy
Fix Released
Medium
PSI+
New
Undecided
Unassigned
empathy (Ubuntu)
Opinion
Low
Unassigned
gnome-terminal (Ubuntu)
Won't Fix
Low
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs
pidgin (Ubuntu)
Opinion
Undecided
Unassigned
xchat (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

The Ctrl-L keybinding to clear the conversation history in empathy is horribly annoying. At this point, most applications (most notably nautilus and gedit, but many others as well) have followed the lead of Firefox to use Ctrl-L to present a "Go to location" UI.

It is remarkably annoying when you press Ctrl-L expecting this and yet your current conversation is cleared due to empathy accidentally still having focus. Moreover, "L" is on the home-row of most keyboard layouts, thereby making it extremely easy to hit accidentally.

I have hit Ctrl-L accidentally countless times both out of finger-fatigue and just carelessness. This requires me to interrupt my thought, go up to the menu, open the log window, find the log, restore my previous mental state, and then keep two windows open until I'm finished referring to the conversation history. From a desktop usability standpoint, that's a pretty destructive operation for a home-row keybinding.

As a distribution which seeks to meet Apple's standard of overall desktop usability (especially for casual users), issues like these are going to need to be handled on a community-wide level (hence the various projects included on this bug). There are few ways to alienate new users faster than by putting legacy-driver keybindings with little applicability to every-day tasks in easy-to-hit positions.

Moreover, in this instance, the legacy argument hardly holds water. While in terminal applications Ctrl-L has historically redrawn the screen to recover from terminal corruption, this doesn't map onto the GUI environment. Having a clear key is certainly understandable, but putting it in a home-row position is just sloppy UI design.

Ben Gamari (bgamari)
description: updated
Changed in empathy:
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote :

feel free to send this upstream to bugzilla.gnome.org for gnome-terminal also, thanks.

Changed in gnome-terminal:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
importance: Undecided → Low
Changed in empathy:
status: Unknown → Invalid
Changed in empathy:
status: Invalid → Unknown
Revision history for this message
Luke Faraone (lfaraone) wrote :

Per your last paragraph, this is a won't fix gnome-terminal.

Changed in gnome-terminal:
status: New → Won't Fix
Changed in empathy:
status: Unknown → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Ryan Thompson (rct86) wrote :

In Pidgin, the Ctrl+L shortcut is even worse, because the same keybinding can also bring up the log window if the buddy list is active. So the same keybinding either views the logs or nukes them, depending on window focus within a single application. Not good.

Revision history for this message
Luke Faraone (lfaraone) wrote : Re: [Bug 304477] Re: Ctrl-L is a poor keybinding for "Clear"

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 20:11, Darwin Award Winner <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> In Pidgin, the Ctrl+L shortcut is even worse, because the same
> keybinding can also bring up the log window if the buddy list is active.
> So the same keybinding either views the logs or nukes them, depending on
> window focus within a single application. Not good.
>

That is definitely a UI inconsistency, but not something we should be (IMHO)
fixing downstream.

--
Luke Faraone
http://luke.faraone.cc

Revision history for this message
Evan Carroll (evancarroll) wrote :

I don't believe pidgin clears logs with Ctrl+L just the window buffer. I tend to like the Ctrl+L myself because I use it often. I don't see how the behavoir of firefox should be used to justify the behavoir of an IM client any more than the behavoir a ptty. In some applications Ctrl+L means location, in others it means clear. This doesn't seem horribly inconsistent on the grand scheme of things because it wouldn't make sense in pidgin to have a location-keybinding, or in nautilus to have a clear. Ctrl+C would be better if it wasn't already taken by sigint -- which really raises the question wtf is Ctrl+C sigint in a modern system, can't we move kernel signals to SysRq F1-F12, that would seem more appropriate.

Revision history for this message
Ryan Thompson (rct86) wrote :

I suppose my point about Pidgin's use of the keybinding is a little different from the title of this report. My point is that Pidgin's keybinding is inconsistent with *itself*, since window focus determines whether Ctrl+L in Pidgin will clear or bring up the logs.

Revision history for this message
Evan Carroll (evancarroll) wrote :

It never clears the logs it only clears the screen *buffer*, the logs are still there. If there is no buffer it opens the [L]ogs.

Revision history for this message
Wolter HV (wolterh) wrote :

You can always change it by just hovering the action and pressing another key combination or Backspace to disable keyboard shortcuts for it.

Revision history for this message
Ryan Thompson (rct86) wrote :

Thank you for this. I had to enable
/desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels in gconf-editor first, but
that worked like a charm.

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 2:35 PM, Wolter Hellmund <email address hidden> wrote:
> You can always change it by just hovering the action and pressing
> another key combination or Backspace to disable keyboard shortcuts for
> it.
>
> --
> Ctrl-L is a poor keybinding for "Clear"
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/304477
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

Changed in empathy:
importance: Unknown → Medium
Changed in pidgin (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Changed in xchat (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Matt Fischer (mfisch)
Changed in xchat (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
Revision history for this message
Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox) wrote :

With dual screen monitors this causes data/productivity loss.
I often have irc on one screen and web-browser on the other.
My eyesight is reading something in the web-browser, and I may press Ctrl+L to change url to something else and I may happen to have my focus on the irc-client.

It's ok if one can scroll-up and read the backscroll history (like in gnome-terminal).

It's not ok xchat style of wiping the buffer, such that one is forced to read history logs.

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package xchat - 2.8.8-7ubuntu2

---------------
xchat (2.8.8-7ubuntu2) raring; urgency=low

  * Optimise default settings for efficient chatting
    + Make tab completion by default use last-used order, not alphabetical.
      This way for example if one is chatting with cjwatson, typing
      "cj<tab>" will complete to cjwatson and not cjohnston.
      Manual migration: ~/.xchat/xchat.conf: completion_sort = 1
    + Do not focus channel upon entering, as that clears highlights when using a znc proxy.
      To be honest, there should be a distinction between manually joining
      new channels & auto-joining. (LP: #189222)
      Manual migration: ~/.xchat/xchat.conf: tab_new_to_front = 0
    + Do not clear buffer with Ctrl-L shortcut. (LP: #304477)
      That shortcut is dominated by web-browsers changing URLs and causes
      context loss if the focus was accidently left on xchat.
  * Fix ftbfs, should link against gmodule.
  * Add xchat-indicator to recommends. (LP: #1048335)
  * Include svg icon (LP: #840673)
 -- Dmitrijs Ledkovs <email address hidden> Sun, 24 Feb 2013 23:03:52 +0000

Changed in xchat (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Christian Weiske (cweiske) wrote :

Since you're really out to make every application useless, please also do it for Psi. It also uses Ctrl+L to clear the chat window. I'd really like not being able to clear the history there anymore.

Revision history for this message
pd5rm (pd5rm) wrote :

I just installed 13.04 and my usual usage of clearing the buffer using control-l in XChat has stopped working. According to: http://xchatdata.net/Using/KeyboardShortcuts, the control-l option to clear screen was built-in and I can't seem to use the keyboard shortcuts settings to get back this option.

There's no reason all apps need to use the same keyboard options (outside of system wide things like cut/copy/paste, and quit ,etc). Specially, since 'location' doesn't make sense in the context of chat apps.

Revision history for this message
Ian Nicholson (imnichol) wrote : Re: [Bug 304477] Re: Ctrl-L is a poor keybinding for "Clear"

Think about it this way: having to use a different keybinding to clear
the cache is much less irritating than having (potentially) multiple
days of communication disappear with no ability to recall. Also, I would
guess that the number of people who use ctrl+L as a shortcut for the url
bar is much higher than the number of people who use it to clear a text
buffer.
Basically, a shortcut as frequently used as ctrl-L should not be a
destructive action that can't be reverted.
Probably the best solution would be a configurable shortcut for clearing
the cache.

Revision history for this message
Christian Weiske (cweiske) wrote :

Then please provide a default key binding for those applications. Xchat is unusable now without one.

Revision history for this message
Alfred Daw (sacarasc) wrote :

To fix the problems this "fix" causes on XChat, go to Settings -> Advanced -> Keyboard Shortcuts.
Add new -> Highlight the net entry (at the bottom) -> Mod = Ctrl, Key = l, Data 1 = /clear and the drop down box should be set to "Run Command".
(If you want this to also work on ctrl+L, add one with an L rather than an l, too.)

Revision history for this message
C. Michael Pilato (cmpilato) wrote :

Using 2.8.8-7ubuntu2, I tried creating a custom key binding to workaround this change. The dialog box would not accept any input for the "Data 1" item. Tried to workaround *that* by editing ~/.xchat2/keybindings.conf directly, adding the following block:

{{{

C
l
Run Command
D1:/CLEAR
D2!
}}}

This did at least show my keybinding in the dialog when next I started xchat, but alas, it still didn't actually work.

Revision history for this message
C. Michael Pilato (cmpilato) wrote :

Oh ... wait ... I take that back. After a couple of restarts, the hand-edits to keybindings.conf *do* appear to work now. Weird, but I'll take it.

Luke Faraone (lfaraone)
Changed in pidgin (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Opinion
Changed in empathy (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → Opinion
Changed in empathy:
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
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