Customizable, environment-aware shortcuts

[idleberg]

A future version of AVS should have more customizable global shortcuts and, more importantly, they should be documented somewhere in the UI. The following were hidden in the changelog of an alpha version of Winamp 2.0:

Hotkeys for main window:

• Any winamp key
• R toggles randomswitching
• F toggles fullscreen framerate counter
• Y and U cycle through presets in order
• Space goes to random preset
• Enter toggles fullscreen
• 0,1-9, F1-F10 load presets
• Ctrl+above save presets

Some of these defaults are not ideal since they have been chosen with QWERTY keyboards and (obviously) the Windows operating system in mind. If future versions also support other operating systems, these defaults should become environment-aware.

Environment awareness should not only take the operating system into account but also keyboard layout (maybe other localization preferences, that I can't think of at this point).

Here are two examples:

Operating system defaults

macOS already has a shortcut to toggle an application into fullscreen, so intuitively a user would want to use that rather than an application-specific shortcut. However, this special case also bears the potential for conflict. Since shortcuts should be customizable by the user, a global shortcut should not be overridable – a custom shortcut can only be an addition to the OS default.

Another oddity is the shortcut to save presets, which I haven't even been aware of. It's beyond me why one would not use the system default (e.g. Ctrl+S?)

Keyboard layout

The shortcuts to change to the next or previous preset is somewhat problematic on non-QWERTY layouts. The defaults Y (previous) and U (next) have clearly been chosen because in a QWERTY layout, they sit next to each other. Personally, I don't find this choice very intuitive. Other shortcuts such as toggling random switching (R), and toggle FPS counter (F) are easy to remember for their mnemonics (for English speakers anyway). IMHO it would be far more intuitive to use the cursor keys to switch presets, possibly ”protected” by a modifier key.

PS: Media-keys are no option, since they are used by Winamp itself.

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Lastly, such information should be documented in the interface. Ideally in a dedicated view, but also equivalent menus. For example, the context-menu has a "fullscreen" entry, but doesn't hint at the available shortcut.

PS: I'm aware, that some of these issues don't affect the future version of AVS itself, but its individual frontends outside of Winamp.

[grandchild]

We could actually incorporate some of these features quite soon (e.g. left-/right-arrow for switching).
I have much less qualms about changing interface features than I have about changing the way presets are rendered.