[openbox] Some usability comments on chroot keybindings

[Dana Jansens]

On 5/29/07, Martin Lucina <mato at kotelna.sk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've just been experimenting with the new chroot keybindings in 3.4, and
> I have a couple of comments from a usability point of view.  (Should
> this go into Bugzilla?)
>
> 1)  Currently, if you enter a chroot and press any keys *not* bound
> inside the chroot, these will get passed to the currently focused
> window.
>
> This is probably a bad idea - I've found myself just during my
> experiments pressing the wrong key and getting confused when I find it
> being passed to the client and doing something silly.
>
> I suggest that pressing a key that is not bound inside the chroot should
> beep and/or flash the dialog displaying the keychain to give the user
> visible feedback that the windowmanager is in a different *mode*.
>
> If someone sees a need to keep the current behaviour it could be kept as
> an option ("passthrough"?).

This actually allows key quoting.  Say you have a vnc window open with
Openbox running inside it.  You can enter a chroot in your main
session, and have all your key bindings work in the nested session!

> 2)  If a chroot has been entered, but no key has been pressed for some
> longish time (60 seconds?), it should be exited automatically.  This is
> to prevent situations like when I get a phone call, then come back to
> the PC and don't notice the chroot dialog in the corner.

There is a timeout for non-chroot key chains. Chrooted chains were
added more or less specifically to avoid the timeout.  Perhaps just
making it longer would be good, but I'm not sure about that.

If you don't want it to be stuck in the chroot, you could just a
keychain without chrooting.  Perhaps that timeout should just be made
a little longer?

Dana