Keybinding for reloading is too hard to hit

[gjtorikian]

Reloading specs and an Atom development pane is a pretty common occurrence. The recently changed keybinding requires an amazing feat of dexterity to hit with one hand.

Alt-R seems to be a pretty good substitute. It currently does nothing in vanilla Atom and Sublime Text. My personal preference would be meta-R, which does nothing in Sublime, but opens up the symbol view in Atom.

[jbarnette]

I don't understand why it was changed from meta-R.

[mcolyer]

So this changed when we remapped our keybindings to match Sublime (Sublime uses cmd+r for searching symbols).

When we thought through whether it was okay to move to a more complex mapping our thesis is that the vast majority of Atom users won't be developing (most users will just use Atom) so it's okay if it isn't quite as available. Our theory rests on the distribution of users we've seen in other OSS communities such as emacs and vi.

FWIW I actually I find the new bindings useful because of the similarity to the keybinding for running all specs and running project specs. Happy to explain/discuss further.

[gjtorikian]

the vast majority of Atom users won't be developing (most users will just use Atom) so it's okay if it isn't quite as available.

This seems entirely antithetical to a core principal of Atom: it's an editor anyone can hack. In order to view the results of my hacking, I have to mash three awkward keys and one far away one. Even if I'm not hacking, after installing a package I'll likely need to reload the editor to see it.

Ultimately, it's not a big deal, since yes, I could remap Refresh to whatever I want it to be. But I think for core Atom packages, being able to easily hit keys one one hand is important.

[jbarnette]

The vast majority of Atom users right now are refreshing their editors pretty frequently, I imagine.

[probablycorey]

I'm all for moving it to something more accessible like cmd-alt-ctrl-z or cmd-alt-ctrl-l. We've been using the cmd-alt-ctrl keybinding prefix for power user commands (like run core specs and run package specs). cmd-r is valuable shortcut real-estate and conflicts with a major keybinding of Sublime (jump to symbol) which is why we changed it.

There is an argument that refreshing Atom is a core feature that needs to be extremely accessible. My thesis is most users won't refresh Atom often. I'm assuming most users will be consumers of packages rather than creators. But we need to balance this with making things convenient for package creators. I could be completely wrong about these assumptions though and we will be measuring this assumption with the metrics we get from our private alpha group.

[mcolyer]

@jbarnette brought this up through our shiny new feedback widget and suggested cmd-ctrl-shift-p.

Riffing on that, how do you feel about ctrl-alt-cmd-l? I was still leaning towards ctrl-alt-cmd for consistency and then I was leaning away from p as we use that to run project specs. However I'm also open to moving the other ctrl-alt-cmd bindings to cmd-ctrl-shift. Thoughts?

[gjtorikian]

I'm way more a fan of bindings I can hit with one key. But second to that, I very much like the idea of keeping my right hand on the right-hand side (so, l or p are both fine with me).

I also still like ctrl-alt-cmd more than cmd-ctrl-shift. I'm trying it out right now and I don't know how my fingers should position! The nice thing about ctrl-alt-cmd is that I can just drop my hand down, and there they are.

[benogle]

I like ctrl-alt-cmd-r :/ Just throwing that out there.

[jbarnette]

The current keybinding bothers me every time I write a line of code in a package.

[kevinsawicki]

I'm on team @benogle and also like ctrl-alt-cmd-r but I am left handed so I could be biased.

[probablycorey]

Fact: if you press ctrl-alt-cmd-r more than 3 times you instantly get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.