[MonoDevelop] VisualStudio Keybindings

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 3:26 AM, Lucas Meijer <lucas at lucasmeijer.com> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> An other thing I ran into while looking at the 2.2 beta:
>
> I couldn't find a "Make it just like visual studio plz" keybinding set,
> in the keybinding configuration screen.

A VS keybinding scheme exists on Windows/Linux, but not on Mac. The
Mac OS makes it impossible to bind many keys, such as the function
keys, which would be an essential part of a VS keybinding scheme, so I
was unable to port directly the VS scheme to Mac.

Maybe a VS-like Mac scheme could be made - if someone wants to make
one and contribute it we'd happily include it. Making a good
keybinding scheme takes time - you can't just assign keys. You need to
test whether it's usable, whether you'd picked the bets assignments
for the good combinations, whether the commands map to what people
expect, etc.

There's also the question of  what "like VS" means. There are actually
about 5 different default VS keybinding schemes depending on which
version you use and which settings profile you pick when you install
it.

> If I'm not mistaken, a large reason for moving MonoDevelop onto windows
> and osx is to gain more developers who know about, and develop for the
> mono platform. If that is true, then I'd say that
>
> 1) visual studio bindings help a lot making the windows developers
> you're reaching out to, like MonoDevelop.
>
> 2) Therefore, they should be the default keybinding. (At least on
> Windows / OSX, I could see an argument for not changing default
> keybindings on linux).

Many of our default keybindings are copied from VS, *where* it makes
sense - we aren't trying to make a straight clone of VS. If you have
suggestions for specific changes to the default keybindings, please
file bugs.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com