Hotkey / dock problem

[mobius]

this is a... suggestion? not really sure

I realize that I'm not good at articulating my requests so this is partly my fault. Anyways, there's a few issues that have come up, mostly in response to my complaint about hotkeys not working when you rezise the docking bars in the editor.

So the entire dock was removed. I didn't realize until now how much I liked using the dock. For one thing I just found it more convenient to have the windows there and out of the way of the drawing part of the map. But more importantly;

Using certain hotkeys (the hotkeys for the commands in the windows like "E" for mark terrain as eraser, for example) only work when either: A) that window is "active" which is no the case while you're drawing in the editor window, it only happens when you click on the window in question. or B) when it was docked.
As of now, without the dock if you're making a level, putting terrain down and want to mark a piece as eraser, or no overwrite or whatever, you can't use the hotkeys unless you first click on that window, which defeats the whole purpose of  using the hotkey.

Since it seemed I was the only one with the hotkey problem in the first place and nobody else's used the dock, I think I'd prefer an option to bring the dock back-as is (with the problem). I don't mind the hotkey problem if it as it was on the last version of NL with it there; the panels were spaced such from the start that they didn't need any resizing. The reason I kept mentioning the issue is mainly because I just thought it's a good idea to fix all the bugs even if they aren't a major pain it might've caused other problems down the road. But this new hotkey problem is a lot worse than the old one.

[namida]

The docks are not coming back unless I can find a way to implement them without all the bugs they caused.

I didn't even know these hotkeys existed; but I'll gladly look into whether I can fix the new bug with them.

[mobius]

I was afraid they caused more bugs then just the one I mentioned but I could remember.

Anyways; on the hotkeys; take a look at the inspector window, all the options that have a letter underlined; this letter is a hotkey. I used E and N frequently for making a piece no overwrite/eraser which made this very fast. Most of the newly added options don't have a hotkey. Some of the old ones don't need a hotkey; like the options with forms; pressing this hotkey will enter your cursor in the form and this also temporarily disables using the hotkeys because your key input will go into the form.

Pressing R enters your cursor into the terrain form; it would be nice if this simply brought up the dialogue box for picking a terrain piece.

[namida]

Okay, I'll look into this next time I'm working on the editor code (can't make any promises as to when, but very likely within the next few days).

Some thoughts:
- In cases where a property exists for both terrain and objects (no overwrite, flip, invert, and in the near-future, rotate), should the two share a hotkey, or should they be seperate? If they should share it - should the checkboxes be merged too? (In all honesty, the only reason they currently aren't is because that's how Lemmix Editor worked and I never changed it. I'm pretty sure it would be easy to change.)
- Any suggestions for hotkeys for options that don't currently have them? Ideally, I'd like (not-already-taken) combinations that are in the form of Ctrl or Shift or Alt + a key. This makes it harder to press them by accident.

[mobius]

sharing the hotkey sounds good. Currently they're separate and there doesn't seem to be any benefit in that; it uses up more hotkeys unnecessarily. The check boxes could be merged too. The ones that only work for one or the other can just be greyed out while selecting the wrong thing.

-T for opening the terrain dialogue box for currently selected piece [does nothing if no piece is selected, or could insert a terrain and open the box.
This could go for both objects and steel also; O for objects and S for steel.
Currently "insert" does this for terrain but not for objects or steel.

-R for rotate

-W for one-way

-Y for only on terrain [unless this option is being removed? IDR]

-L for face left

those are the only suggestions I have for the moment. E and the ones already mentioned are the big ones, but having this for all of them, particularly R and all the turning/rotating options will make moving pieces around much quicker.

oh and perhaps a hotkey for the "Align" option under selection in the menu bar (on top). I use that quite a bit. "A"? or Control-A.

and one for "show trigger areas" didn't realize this had already been added!

[Nepster]

I fully agree that objects and terrain should share hotkeys. If they share checkboxes as well, then it should be made very clear which options apply to both objects and terrain, and which apply only to one of them.

Regarding new hotkeys: It is bad enough for me that we have hotkeys like "Ctrl-N" that is very hard to press with just one hand and hotkeys like "Ctrl-O" that require the right hand, which rests on the mouse. So I would very much prefer to have:
- all hotkeys for terrain and object modification on the left-hand side of the keyboard and
- hotkeys with similar function next to each other. It is very likely that after rotating, I want to mirror it horizontally or vertically. In this case having hotkeys all over the place is far slower and much more prone to errors than having them next to each other.
So e.g. if we use "Ctrl-R" for rotate, "Ctrl-E" should be mirror horizontally (= face left) and "Ctrl-W" should be mirror wertically[sic].

Otherwise I would like to have an option to set custom hotkeys like for the player. Actually, given some of the current hotkey combinations, I would like to have this in any case. (Yes, I know very well that I am responsible for some of the ones I now consider bad ones, but preferences change over time...)

For a previous discussion on editor hotkeys: http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=2432.0

- Any suggestions for hotkeys for options that don't currently have them? Ideally, I'd like (not-already-taken) combinations that are in the form of Ctrl or Shift or Alt + a key. This makes it harder to press them by accident.

I thought the real problem with single keys was that the editor confuses when to write in text boxes and when to apply hotkeys, cf. reply #6 in http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=2432.0?

[namida]

I thought the real problem with single keys was that the editor confuses when to write in text boxes and when to apply hotkeys, cf. reply #6 in http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=2432.0?

Sounds right. I remembered there was some other issue while I was writing the above post, but not what the issue was.

If my memory serves correctly though (I'll test this out when I next work on the editor), this issue only arose after fixing another issue which was in turn introduced in an attempt to fix the panels. It might be possible to have single-key hotkeys without such problems now that the panels don't have to be accounted for.